Meta pulls Galactica demo after three days when users got it to write a wiki article on the benefits of eating crushed glass

Meta's Galactica demo lasted three days. The model was trained on more than 48 million papers, textbooks, lecture notes, scientific websites, and encyclopedias, and was pitched as "a new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe." Meta's researchers reasoned that a curated corpus of humanity's scientific knowledge would produce high-quality output. Visitors instead prompted it into a wiki entry for a fictional paper titled "The benefits of eating crushed glass," and found it would generate authoritative-sounding racist content on request.

Meta unveiled the demo on Tuesday and took it offline Thursday. The non-offensive output had its own problems: wrong dates, wrong animal names, and errors that required subject-matter expertise to spot. Chief AI scientist Yann LeCun's response to the shutdown: "Galactica demo is off line for now. It's no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?"