Clegg played down the risks of the technology.
By Zoe Kleinman and Tom Gerken
The former UK deputy prime minister said the “hype has somewhat run ahead of the technology”.
Current models were “far short” of warnings where AI develops autonomy and thinks for itself, he said.
“In many ways, they’re quite stupid,” he told the BBC’s Today Programme.
He was speaking after Meta said it its large language model known as Llama 2, would be free for everyone to use, known as open source.
Large Language Models – the platforms which power chatbots like ChatGPT – are basically joining dots in enormous datasets of text, and guessing the next word in a sequence, he said. He added that the existential threat warnings issued by some AI experts relate to systems which don’t yet exist.
Meta’s decision to make Llama 2 widely available for commercial businesses and researchers to use has divided the tech community. In some ways its hand has already been forced – the first generation, Llama, was leaked online within a week of its launch.
Open-source is a well-trodden path in this sector – opening up your product for others to use gives you an enormous amount of free user testing data, identifying bugs, problems and improvements along the way.
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