[HN Gopher] Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta...
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       Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR
        
       Author : ilaksh
       Score  : 307 points
       Date   : 2024-12-13 21:07 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ai.meta.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ai.meta.com)
        
       | cube2222 wrote:
       | There's honestly so much interesting stuff here, esp. the llm-
       | related things - large concept models (operating on and
       | predicting concepts, not tokens), dynamic byte latent
       | transformers (byte-level alternative to standard tokenization),
       | sparse memory layers (successfully scaling key-value memory
       | layers without an increase in computational requirements).
       | 
       | Here they are presented as separate things, each of which
       | apparently improves quality / efficiency. I wonder what the
       | quality / efficiency increase is of all those methods put
       | together? Maybe that's what Llama 4 will be?
       | 
       | This looks like a lot of innovation is happening at Meta in those
       | areas, really cool!
        
         | janeway wrote:
         | Side track, but does anyone have suggestions about how to
         | better present such content. I am struggling with similar
         | docs/demos.
         | 
         | As a documentation page, each section is laid out uniformly
         | with section heading, content, link to code and link to paper.
         | 
         | However the page itself is a blog post which will be difficult
         | to find again next year.
         | 
         | Are there other examples of companies having well presented
         | technical summaries which remain findable from the hime page?
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | I'd put a table of contents-like page up front with some
           | exciting short description of each section and use
           | hyperlinks, allowing the user to navigate to the section and
           | back
        
         | ms8 wrote:
         | I hope that Llama 4 or 5 will have a different architecture.
         | All released llamas are +/- same inference with a better
         | training pipeline. The downside is that llamacpp will probably
         | not be able to run new models and maybe it will be too much big
         | rewrite, so we will need new c,cpp,go,rust programs.
        
       | airstrike wrote:
       | This is so cool! Playing around with the first demo is a lot of
       | fun. First one to get the model to moonwalk wins. My best attempt
       | was probably something like `(body_speed_forward < -0.3) *
       | (head_height > 1.0) * (stay_still > 0.2) * (body_speed_vertical <
       | 0.1) * (stay_upright > 0.9)`
       | 
       | https://i.imgur.com/O5hGMo5.gif
       | 
       | Then the "Meta Explore Theory of Mind" is even more interesting.
       | There was a thread about a month ago in which some of us were
       | discussing some of the concepts here like "beliefs" and updating
       | a model of the world accordingly.
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42035985
        
       | pkkkzip wrote:
       | meta has certainly redeemed itself and helping AI become moat-
       | free
        
         | ponector wrote:
         | They still ruin society with the Facebook, no matter how much
         | good they do with LLM.
        
           | bubaumba wrote:
           | Like it or not Meta is a major player in AI world with its
           | free models and tools.
           | 
           | As for social impact of the rest it's debatable. I personally
           | don't have active social accounts, and not sure this is good.
        
             | croes wrote:
             | Free by accident.
        
             | dailykoder wrote:
             | They are not free
        
             | mupuff1234 wrote:
             | Like it or not the social impact isn't really debatable,
             | there's a decent amount of evidence, enough for the surgeon
             | general Dr to issue a warning:
             | 
             | https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/23/surgeon-general-
             | is...
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Even though Meta doesn't sell I/PaaS, Meta's fitness goes up
         | when AI is in the hands of more players than just Google and
         | OpenAI. Commoditize AI and you create a diverse set of
         | businesses that will reach customers through Meta's platforms.
        
         | mupuff1234 wrote:
         | It's not redeeming if you still continue with the original sin.
        
       | Flomolok wrote:
       | It's not a hype when it's delivers and I'm also not seeing a
       | ceiling yet
       | 
       | Yet again interesting progress.
       | 
       | Also I like the idea of using the pose model to generate not a
       | NPC but a avatar living in my phone or glas cube as a hologram.
       | That would be quite scifi futuristic
        
       | puttycat wrote:
       | Can someone explain how watermarking AI videos _voluntarily_
       | helps make AI safer?
        
         | benatkin wrote:
         | It lets those providing AI video generation services watermark
         | all of their videos. So it isn't intended to by voluntary. You
         | would be left with those services that don't comply with
         | whatever the current Big Tech rules are, like people who used
         | Grok/X.ai to generate images in support of Trump despite
         | Grok/X.ai being inferior. https://arstechnica.com/information-
         | technology/2024/08/musks...
        
           | refulgentis wrote:
           | Think this the wrong / older article - when I click the link,
           | this is twitter's hosted Flux model making pictures of Kamala
           | and Trump flying into the world trade center and Trump on a
           | surfboard with busty cat girls. The X.ai one launched this
           | week
        
             | sangnoir wrote:
             | X hosted a white-label Flux model for a while, and freely
             | admitted so .
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | Correct, that's how I know :)
        
               | sangnoir wrote:
               | Got it! I had misunderstood your earlier comment.
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | How much does it take to train a model at this point? I'd tend
         | to expect that it'll be in range of any major state or most
         | oligarchs in the next couple years (if it isn't already). So,
         | making it is probably best of everybody understands the
         | watermarking to be voluntary. Images and videos aren't worth
         | the bits they are printed in at this point, as evidence of
         | anything in particular.
        
       | modeless wrote:
       | I really hope Dynamic Byte Latent Transformers work out. Death to
       | tokenizers!
       | 
       | Interesting that it's a a hierarchical structure but only two
       | levels of hierarchy. Stacking more levels seems like an obvious
       | direction for further research.
        
         | entilzha wrote:
         | Author here :), I do think it's a good direction to look into!
         | That said, aside from it being a bit too much to do at once,
         | you'd also have to be careful about how you distributed your
         | FLOP budget across the hierarchy. With two levels, you can make
         | one level (bytes/local encoder) FLOP efficient and the other
         | (patches/global encoder) FLOP intensive. You'd also need to
         | find a way to group patches into larger units. But ya, there
         | are many directions to go from here!
        
           | Permik wrote:
           | In a way I'm kinda sad that if tokenizers will go the way of
           | the dinosaurs as asking someone to give me a Unicode
           | character from the private use area was one of the last ways
           | you could actually distinguish a co-operative human from an
           | LLM online They simply don't have those characters tokenized,
           | so they can't output them. (But this is technically moot if
           | the LLM has a python interpreter handy)
        
       | bbor wrote:
       | Crazy stuff. Everyone's covering how exciting all these are
       | (especially LCM and the non-tokenizing-tokenizer), but I have to
       | ask in case anyone's been paying attention: why are they using
       | the term "advanced machine intelligence"?
       | 
       | My initial thought is that they want to please/distract the
       | doomers, but I'm prolly just self-centered!
        
         | devmor wrote:
         | I would guess it's in response to the recent market studies
         | showing that the general public views anything labeled "AI" as
         | a likely scam and untrustworthy.
        
         | rajman187 wrote:
         | It originates in Yann LeCunn's paper from 2022 [1], the term
         | AMI being district from AGI. However, the A has changed over
         | the past few years from autonomous to advanced and even
         | augmented, depending on context
         | 
         | [1] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | I think Lecun doesn't like the term AGI.
        
       | intalentive wrote:
       | Every time I have to clean text I wonder why I haven't just
       | trained a byte level denoising autoencoder to handle it for me.
        
         | anon373839 wrote:
         | That's a fun idea. I've always wondered about experimenting
         | with u-nets and hourglass nets for text data since they're so
         | efficient at capturing global and local context (in vision,
         | anyway). But I've never tried it.
        
       | SpaceManNabs wrote:
       | This is like learning 10 different new architectures lol
        
       | Roccan wrote:
       | Meta's "Video Seal": Because nothing says "trustworthy" like a
       | digital chastity belt. Imperceptible, they claim, yet robust
       | enough to survive the gauntlet of internet mangling - sounds like
       | the perfect tool to invisibly track content, not just watermark
       | it.
        
         | redleader55 wrote:
         | I want to have a way to detect if content is AI generated. You
         | might want to run that model on your own creations to ensure
         | you get the credit for them and that no one can steal them.
        
         | UltraSane wrote:
         | Like all tools it can be used for good and evil. It could be
         | installed directly in cameras to sign videos. And people with
         | the power to turn it off could make AI fake videos that much
         | more believable.
        
           | idle_zealot wrote:
           | I would make the argument that these AI safety initiatives
           | yield messaging that muddles and confuses the public on the
           | simple fact that they should not, under any circumstances,
           | use a video or image as proof or assume its veracity. When I
           | tell someone this it is common for them to come back with
           | something like "aren't they working on things to detect if a
           | video is fake?" I think this idea, that video content can
           | still be trusted and that {COMPANY} is being responsible is
           | the real goal of the money pumped into these watermarking
           | techniques. These techniques will not actually help people,
           | images and video will continue to be used for disinformation.
           | The only thing that can stymie that is a broad cultural shift
           | to default to distrust of photographs and video footage, to
           | treat it all like you might a painting or animated cartoon
           | depicting an event; maybe an accurate portrayal, but just as
           | easily totally fabricated. The responsible thing for
           | companies to do would be to spread messaging indicative of
           | this fact, but they would rather engage in safety theater and
           | score some points while keeping users dumb and easily fooled.
        
             | UltraSane wrote:
             | "they should not, under any circumstances, use a video or
             | image as proof or assume its veracity"
             | 
             | This is just silly. Courts never assume the validity of
             | evidence. It is actually assumed to be invalid unless it
             | can be proved to have not been tampered with. Photos have
             | been able to be edited for over 100 years but they are
             | still used as evidence. The person who took the photo will
             | sign an affidavit and or testify in court that it is real.
             | And AI videos are going to be easily detectable for a long
             | time.
        
         | Rastonbury wrote:
         | I think it's reasonable to assume that any large social media
         | company is already tracking video similarity in
         | reuploads/edits. The remix and reused audio features are
         | already baked in. Reverse image search screen caps of
         | tiktok/reel pretty often return the source/original
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | It seems such tracking can be gotten around by something as
           | simple as sticking a Subway Surfers clip underneath the
           | video, given how common that is.
        
       | ks2048 wrote:
       | When I wonder about the business behind Meta doing this, I see
       | they have $70B in cash, so giving a bunch of AI experts hundreds
       | of millions is pocket change.
        
         | aoanevdus wrote:
         | "Commoditize you complement" may be a good way of framing it.
         | Consider that if OpenAI succeeds dramatically and is the only
         | game in town, they could extract huge rents for anyone using
         | their service. So it's in other companies interests (or anyone
         | who wants to use AI) that the AI ecosystem have lots of
         | competition to keep prices low.
        
         | wrsh07 wrote:
         | Imagine that something fundamental shifts in the world of AI
         | research. It could be anything: AI suddenly makes programmers
         | much more productive, AI becomes very good at identifying
         | vulnerabilities, AI chat becomes a new major source of
         | entertainment, AI images become an item popularly shared on
         | Instagram (etc)
         | 
         | Suppose any one of these things happened and suddenly Facebook
         | wished that it had access to state of the art models so that it
         | could customize them for its uses (internal developers or
         | tools, embedding in their app).
         | 
         | Imagine how they would feel if the only way they could access
         | these models were by signing 7-9 figure deals with a model
         | dealer like OpenAI. Even worse, imagine if one of their main
         | competitors in advertising started providing robust AI tools to
         | help advertisers adapt their creatives to various form factors.
         | Facebook is now way behind and possibly has to shell out
         | millions to a company like OpenAI all while also losing ad
         | market share worth billions per quarter (ads on Google start
         | performing much better, so Google gets more ad spend)
         | 
         | If this worst case scenario came to pass, Facebook would look
         | foolish. If even one of these things were likely their
         | investments make sense. The rest (open source, make meta a cool
         | place to work) are a strategy credit.
        
         | cma wrote:
         | You can't have enough top researchers without letting them
         | publish.
        
         | almostgotcaught wrote:
         | everyone that has responded so far has it wrong (naively so).
         | 
         | FB sells ad space on several apps. those apps needs people on
         | them in order for the ad space to be worth anything. people, in
         | turn, need content to attract them to the apps. so it's simple:
         | enable people/companies/whomever to generate tons of content
         | for cheap and consequently share it on the apps. that's it.
        
           | SideQuark wrote:
           | Except giving out the tools makes easier for competitors like
           | TikTok to do the same, drawing revenue away from meta.
           | 
           | So that's not it. Naively so.
        
             | tzs wrote:
             | Couldn't the same argument be made for all kinds of things
             | companies have made open? Some examples:
             | 
             | * Tesla gave away its EV patents.
             | 
             | * Pixar and DreamWorks have both open-sourced some of their
             | tools, including tools used to make some of their best
             | works. For example DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been
             | used on everything they have done since "How to Train Your
             | Dragon: The Hidden World", including "Puss in Boots: The
             | Last Wish" and "The Wild Robot", and will be used on their
             | upcoming films.
             | 
             | * Facebook open-sourced React.
             | 
             | * Google open-sourced Chromium.
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | In the case of Tesla, if you want to sell cars, you
               | benefit from open up your charging tech, right?
        
             | mttddd wrote:
             | the tools but not necessarily the data, presumably they
             | have internally trained versions
        
             | almostgotcaught wrote:
             | this is like saying that AMD making chips that intel/nvidia
             | employees can buy and use to do their jobs is a bad
             | strategy for AMD. lol. ok not every single strategic choice
             | needs to both grow the top line and be anti-competitive.
             | some can _just_ grow the top line.
        
           | mttddd wrote:
           | content but also better ad targetting by better understanding
           | all of the content that users post
        
         | sangnoir wrote:
         | Those AI experts are a played a critical role in Meta getting
         | that $70B in the first place
        
       | nurumaik wrote:
       | https://dontfuckwithscroll.com/
        
       | mtkd wrote:
       | I was fortunate to get to a talk by Ross Taylor ex-Meta recently
       | at the AI Engineer London meetup
       | 
       | He's recorded the full talk here now:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5l5OvJ01ws
       | 
       | I had missed how much Meta have been doing on reasoning, ToM etc.
        
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