With AIs Wide Open

Are today’s large language models too hot to handle? Bridget Todd digs into the risks and rewards of open sourcing the tech that makes ChatGPT talk.

In their competitive rush to release powerful LLMs to the world, tech companies are fueling a controversy about what should and shouldn’t be open in generative AI.

In this episode, we meet open source research communities who have stepped up to develop more responsible machine learning alternatives.

David Evan Harris worked at Meta to make AI more responsible and now shares his concerns about the risks of open large language models for disinformation and more. 

Abeba Birhane is a Mozilla advisor and cognitive scientist who calls for openness to facilitate independent audits of large datasets sourced from the internet. 

Sasha Luccioni is a researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face who says open source communities are key to developing ethical and sustainable machine learning.

Andriy Mulyar is co-founder and CTO of Nomic, the startup behind the open source chatbot GPT4All, an offline and private alternative to ChatGPT.

IRL: Online Life is Real Life is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 7, host Bridget Todd talks to AI builders that put people ahead of profit.