META'S NEWEST AI MODEL BEATS SOME PEERS. BUT ITS AMPED-UP AI AGENTS ARE CONFUSING FACEBOOK USERS

Generative AI is advancing so quickly that the latest chatbots available today could be out of date tomorrow.

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Google, Meta Platforms and OpenAI, along with startups such as Anthropic, Cohere and France’s Mistral, have been churning out new AI language models and hoping to persuade customers they’ve got the smartest, handiest or most efficient chatbots.

Meta is the latest to up its game, unveiling new models this week that will be among the most visible: they’re already getting baked into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But in a sign of the technology’s ongoing limitations, Meta’s amped-up AI agents have been spotted this week confusing Facebook users by posing as people with made-up life experiences.

While Meta is saving the most powerful of its AI models, called Llama 3, for later, it’s publicly releasing two smaller versions of the same Llama 3 system that power its Meta AI assistant. AI models are trained on vast pools of data to generate responses, with newer versions typically smarter and more capable than their predecessors. The publicly released models were built with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters — a measurement of how much data the system is trained on. A bigger, roughly 400 billion parameter model is still in training.

“The vast majority of consumers don’t candidly know or care too much about the underlying base model, but the way they will experience it is just as a much more useful, fun and versatile AI assistant,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, in an interview.