Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users

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Meta will auto-blur nudity in Instagram DMs in latest teen safety step | TechCrunch

Meta said on Thursday that it is testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams. This

techcrunch.com

Meta will auto-blur nudity in Instagram DMs in latest teen safety step​

Natasha Lomas @riptari / 9:28 AM EDT•April 11, 2024

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Image Credits: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / Contributor / Getty Images

Meta said on Thursday that it is testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams. This includes a feature called “Nudity Protection in DMs,” which automatically blurs images detected as containing nudity.

The tech giant said it will also nudge teens to protect themselves by serving a warning encouraging them to think twice about sharing intimate images. Meta hopes this will boost protection against scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return.

The company said it is also implementing changes that will make it more difficult for potential scammers and criminals to find and interact with teens. Meta said it is developing new technology to identify accounts that are “potentially” involved in sextortion scams, and will apply limits on how these suspect accounts can interact with other users.

In another step announced on Thursday, Meta said it has increased the data it is sharing with the cross-platform online child safety program, Lantern, to include more “sextortion-specific signals.”

The social networking giant has had long-standing policies that ban people from sending unwanted nudes or seeking to coerce others into sharing intimate images. However, that doesn’t stop these problems from occurring and causing misery for scores of teens and young people — sometimes with extremely tragic results.

We’ve rounded up the latest crop of changes in more detail below.

Nudity screens​

Nudity Protection in DMs aims to protect teen users of Instagram from cyberflashing by putting nude images behind a safety screen. Users will be able to choose whether or not to view such images.

“We’ll also show them a message encouraging them not to feel pressure to respond, with an option to block the sender and report the chat,” said Meta.

The nudity safety screen will be turned on by default for users under 18 globally. Older users will see a notification encouraging them to turn the feature on.

“When nudity protection is turned on, people sending images containing nudity will see a message reminding them to be cautious when sending sensitive photos, and that they can unsend these photos if they’ve changed their mind,” the company added.

Anyone trying to forward a nude image will see the same warning encouraging them to reconsider.

The feature is powered by on-device machine learning, so Meta said it will work within end-to-end encrypted chats because the image analysis is carried out on the user’s own device.

The nudity filter has been in development for nearly two years.

Safety tips​

In another safeguarding measure, Instagram users who send or receive nudes will be directed to safety tips (with information about the potential risks involved), which, according to Meta, have been developed with guidance from experts.

“These tips include reminders that people may screenshot or forward images without your knowledge, that your relationship to the person may change in the future, and that you should review profiles carefully in case they’re not who they say they are,” the company wrote in a statement. “They also link to a range of resources, including Meta’s Safety Center, support helplines, StopNCII.org for those over 18, and Take It Down for those under 18.”

The company is also testing showing pop-up messages to people who may have interacted with an account that has been removed for sextortion. These pop-ups will also direct users to relevant resources.

“We’re also adding new child safety helplines from around the world into our in-app reporting flows. This means when teens report relevant issues — such as nudity, threats to share private images or sexual exploitation or solicitation — we’ll direct them to local child safety helplines where available,” the company said.

Tech to spot sextortionists​

While Meta says it removes sextortionists’ accounts when it becomes aware of them, it first needs to spot bad actors to shut them down. So, the company is trying to go further by “developing technology to help identify where accounts may potentially be engaging in sextortion scams, based on a range of signals that could indicate sextortion behavior.”

“While these signals aren’t necessarily evidence that an account has broken our rules, we’re taking precautionary steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teen accounts,” the company said. “This builds on the work we already do to prevent other potentially suspicious accounts from finding and interacting with teens.”

It’s not clear what technology Meta is using to do this analysis, nor which signals might denote a potential sextortionist (we’ve asked for more details). Presumably, the company may analyze patterns of communication to try to detect bad actors.

Accounts that get flagged by Meta as potential sextortionists will face restrictions on messaging or interacting with other users.

“[A]ny message requests potential sextortion accounts try to send will go straight to the recipient’s hidden requests folder, meaning they won’t be notified of the message and never have to see it,” the company wrote.

Users who are already chatting with potential scam or sextortion accounts will not have their chats shut down, but will be shown Safety Notices “encouraging them to report any threats to share their private images, and reminding them that they can say ‘no’ to anything that makes them feel uncomfortable,” according to the company.

Teen users are already protected from receiving DMs from adults they are not connected with on Instagram (and also from other teens, in some cases). But Meta is taking this a step further: The company said it is testing a feature that hides the “Message” button on teenagers’ profiles for potential sextortion accounts — even if they’re connected.

“We’re also testing hiding teens from these accounts in people’s follower, following and like lists, and making it harder for them to find teen accounts in Search results,” it added.

It’s worth noting the company is under increasing scrutiny in Europe over child safety risks on Instagram, and enforcers have questioned its approach since the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force last summer.

A long, slow creep towards safety​

Meta has announced measures to combat sextortion before — most recently in February, when it expanded access to Take It Down. The third-party tool lets people generate a hash of an intimate image locally on their own device and share it with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, helping to create a repository of non-consensual image hashes that companies can use to search for and remove revenge porn.

The company’s previous approaches to tackle that problem had been criticized, as they required young people to upload their nudes. In the absence of hard laws regulating how social networks need to protect children, Meta was left to self-regulate for years — with patchy results.

However, some requirements have landed on platforms in recent years — such as the U.K.’s Children Code (which came into force in 2021) and the more recent DSA in the EU — and tech giants like Meta are finally having to pay more attention to protecting minors.

For example, in July 2021, Meta started defaulting young people’s Instagram accounts to private just ahead of the U.K. compliance deadline. Even tighter privacy settings for teens on Instagram and Facebook followed in November 2022.

This January, the company announced it would set stricter messaging settings for teens on Facebook and Instagram by default, shortly before the full compliance deadline for the DSA kicked in in February.

This slow and iterative feature creep at Meta concerning protective measures for young users raises questions about what took the company so long to apply stronger safeguards. It suggests Meta opted for a cynical minimum in safeguarding in a bid to manage the impact on usage, and prioritize engagement over safety. That is exactly what Meta whistleblower Francis Haugen repeatedly denounced her former employer for.

Asked why the company is not also rolling out these new protections to Facebook, a spokeswoman for Meta told TechCrunch, “We want to respond to where we see the biggest need and relevance — which, when it comes to unwanted nudity and educating teens on the risks of sharing sensitive images — we think is on Instagram DMs, so that’s where we’re focusing first.”

 

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Spoiler: thread continued

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#Meta unveils the latest version of Meta AI, now supercharged with the state-of-the-art #LLaMA3 AI model and fully open-sourced.

This upgrade positions Meta AI as potentially the smartest freely accessible AI assistant. Now integrated into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger search, plus a new website Meta AI for easy access.

New features include real-time photo animation and creation playback videos. #AI #MetaAI #Innovation

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Yes you will need a VPN to access it.


To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196

 

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Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI is now “the most intelligent AI assistant” that’s available for free.

www.theverge.com

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now​

Meta’s AI assistant is being put everywhere across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Meanwhile, the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, has arrived.​

By Alex Heath, a deputy editor and author of the Command Linenewsletter. He has over a decade of experience covering the tech industry.

Apr 18, 2024, 11:59 AM EDT

75 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg announcing Meta’s AI assistant at Connect 2023. Image: Meta

ChatGPT kicked off the AI chatbot race. Meta is determined to win it.

To that end: the Meta AI assistant, introduced last September, is now being integrated into the search box of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It’s also going to start appearing directly in the main Facebook feed. You can still chat with it in the messaging inboxes of Meta’s apps. And for the first time, it’s now accessible via a standalone website at Meta.ai.

For Meta’s assistant to have any hope of being a real ChatGPT competitor, the underlying model has to be just as good, if not better. That’s why Meta is also announcing Llama 3, the next major version of its foundational open-source model. Meta says that Llama 3 outperforms competing models of its class on key benchmarks and that it’s better across the board at tasks like coding. Two smaller Llama 3 models are being released today, both in the Meta AI assistant and to outside developers, while a much larger, multimodal version is arriving in the coming months.

The goal is for Meta AI to be “the most intelligent AI assistant that people can freely use across the world,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells me. “With Llama 3, we basically feel like we’re there.”

In the US and a handful of other countries, you’re going to start seeing Meta AI in more places, including Instagram’s search bar. Image: Meta

How Google results look in Meta AI. Meta

The Meta AI assistant is the only chatbot I know of that now integrates real-time search results from both Bing and Google — Meta decides when either search engine is used to answer a prompt. Its image generation has also been upgraded to create animations (essentially GIFs), and high-res images now generate on the fly as you type. Meanwhile, a Perplexity-inspired panel of prompt suggestions when you first open a chat window is meant to “demystify what a general-purpose chatbot can do,” says Meta’s head of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle.

While it has only been available in the US to date, Meta AI is now being rolled out in English to Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, with more countries and languages coming. It’s a far cry from Zuckerberg’s pitch of a truly global AI assistant, but this wider release gets Meta AI closer to eventually reaching the company’s more than 3 billion daily users.

Meta AI’s image generation can now render images in real time as you type. Meta

There’s a comparison to be made here to Stories and Reels, two era-defining social media formats that were both pioneered by upstarts — Snapchat and TikTok, respectively — and then tacked onto Meta’s apps in a way that made them even more ubiquitous.

“I expect it to be quite a major product”

Some would call this shameless copying. But it’s clear that Zuckerberg sees Meta’s vast scale, coupled with its ability to quickly adapt to new trends, as its competitive edge. And he’s following that same playbook with Meta AI by putting it everywhere and investing aggressively in foundational models.

“I don’t think that today many people really think about Meta AI when they think about the main AI assistants that people use,” he admits. “But I think that this is the moment where we’re really going to start introducing it to a lot of people, and I expect it to be quite a major product.”

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“Compete with everything out there”​

The new web app for Meta AI. Image: Meta

Today Meta is introducing two open-source Llama 3 models for outside developers to freely use. There’s an 8-billion parameter model and a 70-billion parameter one, both of which will be accessible on all the major cloud providers. (At a very high level, parameters dictate the complexity of a model and its capacity to learn from its training data.)

Llama 3 is a good example of how quickly these AI models are scaling. The biggest version of Llama 2, released last year, had 70 billion parameters, whereas the coming large version of Llama 3 will have over 400 billion, Zuckerberg says. Llama 2 trained on 2 trillion tokens (essentially the words, or units of basic meaning, that compose a model), while the big version of Llama 3 has over 15 trillion tokens. (OpenAI has yet to publicly confirm the number of parameters or tokens in GPT-4.)

A key focus for Llama 3 was meaningfully decreasing its false refusals, or the number of times a model says it can’t answer a prompt that is actually harmless. An example Zuckerberg offers is asking it to make a “killer margarita.” Another is one I gave him during an interview last year, when the earliest version of Meta AI wouldn’t tell me how to break up with someone.

Meta has yet to make the final call on whether to open source the 400-billion-parameter version of Llama 3 since it’s still being trained. Zuckerberg downplays the possibility of it not being open source for safety reasons.

“I don’t think that anything at the level that what we or others in the field are working on in the next year is really in the ballpark of those type of risks,” he says. “So I believe that we will be able to open source it.”

Related​

• Q&A: Mark Zuckerberg on winning the AI race
  

Before the most advanced version of Llama 3 comes out, Zuckerberg says to expect more iterative updates to the smaller models, like longer context windows and more multimodality. He’s coy on exactly how that multimodality will work, though it sounds like generating video akin to OpenAI’s Sora isn’t in the cards yet. Meta wants its assistant to become more personalized, and that could mean eventually being able to generate images in your own likeness.

Here, it’s worth noting that there isn’t yet a consensus on how to properly evaluate the performance of these models in a truly standardized way. Image: Meta

Meta gets hand-wavy when I ask for specifics on the data used for training Llama 3. The total training dataset is seven times larger than Llama 2’s, with four times more code. No Meta user data was used, despite Zuckerberg recently boasting that it’s a larger corpus than the entirety of Common Crawl. Otherwise, Llama 3 uses a mix of “public” internet data and synthetic AI-generated data. Yes, AI is being used to build AI.

The pace of change with AI models is moving so fast that, even if Meta is reasserting itself atop the open-source leaderboard with Llama 3 for now, who knows what tomorrow brings. OpenAI is rumored to be readying GPT-5, which could leapfrog the rest of the industry again. When I ask Zuckerberg about this, he says Meta is already thinking about Llama 4 and 5. To him, it’s a marathon and not a sprint.

“At this point, our goal is not to compete with the open source models,” he says. “It’s to compete with everything out there and to be the leading AI in the world.”

 

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Yann LeCun says Meta AI ‘quickly becoming most used’ assistant, challenging OpenAI’s dominance

Meta challenges OpenAI with Llama 3.1, an open-source AI model rivaling GPT-4o, as Yann LeCun claims Meta AI is becoming the most widely used AI assistant.

venturebeat.com

Yann LeCun says Meta AI ‘quickly becoming most used’ assistant, challenging OpenAI’s dominance​

Michael Nuñez@MichaelFNunez

July 23, 2024 2:26 PM

Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney

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Meta Platforms has thrown down the gauntlet in the AI race today with the release of Llama 3.1, its most sophisticated artificial intelligence model to date.

This advanced model now powers Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant, which has been strategically deployed across its suite of platforms including WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban Meta, with plans to extend to Meta Quest next month. The widespread implementation of Llama 3.1 potentially places advanced AI capabilities at the fingertips of billions of users globally.

The move represents a direct challenge to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, particularly targeting OpenAI’s market-leading position. It also underscores Meta’s commitment to open-source development, marking a major escalation in the AI competition.

Llama 3.1 now powers Meta AI, which is quickly becoming the most widely used AI assistant.

Meta AI can be accessed through WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, Ray-Ban Meta, and next month in Meta Quest.

It answers questions, summarizes long documents, helps you code or do…

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) July 23, 2024

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, made a bold proclamation on X.com following the release this morning that caught many in the AI community off guard. “Llama 3.1 now powers Meta AI, which is quickly becoming the most widely used AI assistant,” LeCun said, directly challenging the supremacy of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has thus far dominated the AI assistant market.

If substantiated, LeCun’s assertion could herald a major shift in the AI landscape, potentially reshaping the future of AI accessibility and development.

Open-source vs. Closed-source: Meta’s disruptive strategy in the AI market​

The centerpiece of Meta’s release is the Llama 3.1 405B model, featuring 405 billion parameters. The company boldly contends that this model’s performance rivals that of leading closed-source models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, across various tasks. Meta’s decision to make such a powerful model openly available stands in stark contrast to the proprietary approaches of its competitors, particularly OpenAI.

This release comes at a critical juncture for Meta, following a $200 billion market value loss earlier this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted the company’s focus towards AI, moving away from its previous emphasis on the metaverse. “Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI,” Zuckerberg said, in what appears to be a direct challenge to OpenAI’s business model.

Wall Street analysts have expressed skepticism about Meta’s open-source strategy, questioning its potential for monetization, especially when compared to OpenAI’s reported $3.4 billion annualized revenue. However, the tech community has largely welcomed the move, seeing it as a catalyst for innovation and wider AI access.

Our Llama 3.1 405B is now openly available! After a year of dedicated effort, from project planning to launch reviews, we are thrilled to open-source the Llama 3 herd of models and share our findings through the paper:

?Llama 3.1 405B, continuously trained with a 128K context… pic.twitter.com/RwhedAluSM

— Aston Zhang (@astonzhangAZ) July 23, 2024

AI arms race heats up: Implications for innovation, safety, and market leadership​

The new model boasts improvements including an extended context length of 128,000 tokens, enhanced multilingual capabilities, and improved reasoning. Meta has also introduced the “Llama Stack,” a set of standardized interfaces aimed at simplifying development with Llama models, potentially making it easier for developers to switch from OpenAI’s tools.

While the release has generated excitement in the AI community, it also raises concerns about potential misuse. Meta claims to have implemented robust safety measures, but the long-term implications of widely available advanced AI remain a topic of debate among experts.

Why are FTC & DOJ issuing statements w/ EU competition authorities discussing "risks" in the blazingly competitive, U.S.-built AI ecosystem? And on the same day that Meta turbocharges disruptive innovation with the first-ever frontier-level open source AI model? A ? pic.twitter.com/vrItR28YIo

— Neil Chilson ?? ? (@neil_chilson) July 23, 2024

As the AI race intensifies, Meta’s latest move positions the company as a formidable competitor in a field previously dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic. The success of Llama 3.1 could potentially reshape the AI industry, influencing everything from market dynamics to development methodologies.

The tech industry is closely watching this development, with many speculating on how OpenAI and other AI leaders will respond to Meta’s direct challenge. As the competition heats up, the implications for AI accessibility, innovation, and market leadership remain to be seen, with OpenAI’s dominant position now under serious threat.

 

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Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves | TechCrunch

In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he thinks content creators will want to use AI to scale their reach.

techcrunch.com

Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves​

Kyle Wiggers

7:22 PM PDT • July 23, 2024

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Image Credits: Jeff Bottari / Getty Images

Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience engagement. But Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, thinks that AI could solve this problem.

In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for a future in which creators have their own bots, of sorts, that capture their personalities and “business objectives.” Creators will offload some community outreach to these bots to free up time for other, presumably more important tasks, Zuckerberg says.


“I think there’s going to be a huge unlock where basically every creator can pull in all their information from social media and train these systems to reflect their values and their objectives and what they’re trying to do, and then people can can interact with that,” Zuckerberg said. “It’ll be almost like this artistic artifact that creators create that people can kind of interact with in different ways.”

Zuckerberg’s thinking is common in many techno-optimist circles: that AI is an inherent good because it promises to vastly scale up the impact a single person — or organization — can have. (Google, too, has pitched AI-powered tools for creators.) But when productivity comes at the expense of the personal touch, would creators, whose audiences value authenticity, really be the ones to embrace generative AI?

Not helping Zuckerberg’s case, Meta hasn’t exactly delivered a strong sales pitch.

When Meta began to roll out AI-powered bots as a part of its broader Meta AI push earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the bots to fall prey to the many pitfalls of today’s generative AI tech, in particular hallucinations. The Associated Press observed one bot inserting itself into a conversation in a Facebook group for Manhattan moms and claiming it had a child in the NYC school district. Another bot offered to give away a nonexistent camera and A/C in a forum for swapping free items near Boston.

To be fair, Meta’s AI is improving — or so the company claims, at least. The latest release, the Llama 3.1 model family, which will power a number of features across the tech giant’s platforms, is Meta’s most sophisticated yet judging by the benchmarks. But hallucinations — and general mistakes in planning and reasoning — remain an unsolved problem in generative AI, and Meta offers no research breakthroughs there.

It’s tough to imagine creators putting trust in the hands of flawed AI bots to interact with their fans. In the interview, Zuckerberg acknowledges that Meta has to “mitigate some of the concerns” around its use of generative AI and win users’ trust over the long term. This is especially true as some of Meta’s AI training practices are actively driving creators away from its platforms.

 

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