U.S. Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ranking Member and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, wrote a new letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seeking information about the “leak” of its Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) program.
While Meta originally only purported to release the program to approved researchers within the AI community, the company’s vetting and safeguards appear to have been minimal and the full model appeared online within days, making the model, “available to anyone, anywhere in the world, without monitoring or oversight,” the Senators wrote.
In the letter, Hawley and Blumenthal warned that there were “seemingly minimal” protections in Meta’s “unrestrained and permissive” release, and the company “appears to have failed to conduct any meaningful risk assessment in advance of release, despite the realistic potential for broad distribution, even if unauthorized.”
Citing these concerns, the Senators pressed Meta for answers on how the company assessed the risk of releasing LLaMA, what steps were taken to prevent the abuse of the model, and how Meta is updating policies and practices based on its unrestrained availability.
The letter follows Hawley and Blumenthal’s subcommittee hearing last month, which included testimony from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery, and NYU Professor Gary Marcus.
Read the full letter by clicking here.
