The Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine confirmed that he uses the controversial Clearview AI face recognition system for locating dead Russian soldiers.
“It's a courtesy to the mothers of these soldiers, and we're distributing these information through social media to at least inform the families that they have lost their sons and allow them at some point to come to collect their bodies," Ukraine's deputy prime minister and head of the digital transformation ministry, Mykhailo Fedorov, told Reuters.
Clearview AI is a startup based in New York. It first made headlines when CEO Hoan Thon-That admitted to copying billions of images from social media sites like Instagram and Twitter to create a large base data. The app's facial recognition algorithms are trained to match images against this huge database. By linking people's selfies to their social media accounts, their identities can also be revealed.
Technology when it first appeared caused storms. The company faces fines from the international community and has been ordered to shut down in some countries. Nevertheless, it continues to grow and now the face recognition it offers is used in Ukraine.
Clearview AI also plans to identify faces as they age, to strike big government deals.
An open source model of 50 billion parameters is now running with the name GPT-NeoX-20B that anyone can use free, made by Eleuther AI, a team developers and researchers working together.
Of course there is a great deal of interest in resolving issues of bias, toxic language or misinformation created by these language models, as they are very difficult to configure in the way a human brain thinks.
The GPT-NeoX-20B succeeds the GPT-J-6B. It is currently the largest open source model, and contains hundreds of billions of parameters. Another team effort by the BigScience team is currently training a separate 176 billion parameter open source model that has not yet been released.
