From ancient medical ethics to modern AI challenges, the journey of consent represents one of humanity's most fascinating ethical evolutions. In my latest blog post, I explore how we've moved from medical paternalism to a new frontier where AI capabilities force us to rethink consent.
The "consent gap" in AI is real: while we can approve initial data use, AI systems can generate countless unforeseen applications of our personal information. It's like signing a blank check without knowing all possible amounts that could be filled in.
Should we reimagine consent for the AI age? Perhaps we need dynamic consent systems that evolve alongside AI capabilities, similar to how healthcare transformed from physician-centered authority to patient autonomy.
Curious to hear your thoughts: how can we balance technological innovation with meaningful user sovereignty over digital identity?
Why choose between strong LLM reasoning and efficient models?
Use DeepSeek to generate high-quality training data, then distil that knowledge into ModernBERT answerdotai/ModernBERT-base for fast, efficient classification.
Given an input image, it generates several queries along with explanations to justify them. This approach can generate synthetic data for fine-tuning ColPali models.
The Hugging Face community has rated educational content in languages spoken by 1.6 billion people! New additions: โข Japanese โข Italian โข Old High German
๐ซ...And we're live!๐ซ Seasonal newsletter from ethicsy folks at Hugging Face, exploring the ethics of "AI Agents" https://huggingface.co/blog/ethics-soc-7 Our analyses found: - There's a spectrum of "agent"-ness - *Safety* is a key issue, leading to many other value-based concerns Read for details & what to do next! With @evijit , @giadap , and @sasha
๐ค๐ค ๐ป Speaking of AI agents ... ...Is easier with the right words ;)
My colleagues @meg@evijit@sasha and @giadap just published a wonderful blog post outlining some of the main relevant notions with their signature blend of value-informed and risk-benefits contrasting approach. Go have a read!
FineWeb2 is a massive multilingual dataset for pre-training language models. Like any web-scale dataset, it contains low-quality content. How can we improve it?
Over the past months, an amazing community of 400+ annotators has been labelling content quality (using Argilla) across 23 languages through the FineWeb-C initiative.
Today, I'm happy to share the first classifier trained on this data.
๐ What we've built:
- A lightweight classifier that efficiently removes low-quality content - 90%+ precision demonstrated on Danish & Swedish - Can process the 43M+ documents in Danish FineWeb2 with minimal compute
๐ Why this matters: The approach can be reproduced for any of the 23 languages in FineWeb-C (data-is-better-together/fineweb-c). We can improve training data quality at scale without massive compute resources by starting with community annotations and training small, efficient classifiers.
This week a few more languages have got 1,000 annotations for the educational quality of data from HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2.
Why should you care?
The quality of pre-training data can have a big impact on the performance of downstream language models trained on that data (HuggingFaceFW/blogpost-fineweb-v1).
Being able to filter by educational quality is on way of improving the quality of the data you use for training an LLM. Very importantly this approach can also reduce the amount of data needed for pertaining.
Why not use an LLM?
LLMs can be used to annotate educational quality for a subset of data. This data can then be used to train a smaller encoder only model to label the full dataset. However, this may not work well for languages outside of english. This is where fineweb-c (community) comes in.
The community is annotating the educational quality of fineweb2 data. Currently 114 languages have some annotations. These annotations will enable a number of things:
- Evaluate whether an LLM can label the educational quality for texts in that language well - Directly be used for training quality classifiers - Help discover other rules and huerisitcs for refining fineweb2 further for different languages.
๐ช๐บ Policy Thoughts in the EU AI Act Implementation ๐ช๐บ
There is a lot to like in the first draft of the EU GPAI Code of Practice, especially as regards transparency requirements. The Systemic Risks part, on the other hand, is concerning for both smaller developers and for external stakeholders.
I wrote more on this topic ahead of the next draft. TLDR: more attention to immediate large-scale risks and to collaborative solutions supported by evidence can help everyone - as long as developers disclose sufficient information about their design choices and deployment contexts.
Increasingly, LLMs are becoming very useful for helping scale annotation tasks, i.e. labelling and filtering. When combined with the structured generation, this can be a very scalable way of doing some pre-annotation without requiring a large team of human annotators.
๐ 1M public posts from Bluesky's firehose API ๐ Includes text, metadata, and language predictions ๐ฌ Perfect to experiment with using ML for Bluesky ๐ค
Excited to see people build more open tools for a more open social media platform!
The Bluesky AT Protocol unlocks exciting possibilities: - Building custom feeds using ML - Creating dashboards for data exploration - Developing custom models for Bluesky To gather Bluesky resources on the Hub, I've created a community org: https://huggingface.co/bluesky-community
My first rather modest contribution is a dashboard that shows the number of posts every second. Drinking straight from the firehose API ๐ฐ