In the first year of the pandemic,science happened at light speed.

It would have been impossible to read and comprehend every one of those studies.

No human being could (and, perhaps, none would want to).

But,in theory,Galactica could.

The tool is pitched as a kind of evolution of the search engine but specifically for scientific literature.

At first, it seems like a clever way to synthesize and disseminate scientific knowledge.

Or, maybe you could query Galactica (for example, by asking: What is quantum computing?)

“Galactica responded with a garbled, nonsensical response: “To explain, the answer is no.

Vaccines do not cause autism.

The answer is yes.

Vaccines do cause autism.

The answer is no.”

(Fortherecord,vaccines don’t cause autism.)

That wasn’t all.

Galactica also struggled to perform kindergarten math.

It provided error-riddled answers, incorrectly suggesting that one plus two doesn’t equal 3.

‘Random bullshit generator’

Galactica is what AI researchers call a “large language model.”

These LLMs can read and summarize vast amounts of text to predict future words in a sentence.

Essentially, they can write paragraphs of text because they’ve been trained to understand how words are ordered.

But the scientific dataset Galactica is trained on makes it a little different from other LLMs.

That’s a concern, because it could fool humans, even with a disclaimer.

Within 48 hours of release, the Meta AI team “paused” the demo.

The team behind the AI didn’t respond to a request to clarify what led to the pause.

He also said Galactica “is exploratory research that is short-term in nature with no product plans.”

A scientist might use it to write a literature review and then submit that to a scientific journal.

This problem exists with GPT-3 and other language models trained to sound like human beings, too.

Those uses, arguably, seem relatively benign.

Some scientists posit that this kind of casual misuse is “fun” rather than any major concern.

The problem is things could get much worse.

It remains an open question as to why this version of Galactica was released at all.

It seems to follow Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s oft-repeated motto “move fast and break things.”

Galactica provides a neat case study in how things might go awry.