Galactica
The science LLM that lasted three days in public
Latest: Galactica 125M-120B (Nov 2022; demo withdrawn after 3 days)
A 120B model trained on 48 million scientific papers, textbooks, and reference material to 'organize science' — write reviews, generate citations, solve equations. The public demo launched November 15, 2022 and was pulled three days later after criticism that it fluently hallucinated authoritative-sounding fake science. Model weights remain available.
Why it matters
Galactica is AI's most instructive failure: a 120B model trained on 48 million papers to 'organize science' whose demo was pulled after three days for fluently hallucinating fake citations and papers — two weeks before ChatGPT launched. It made hallucination a mainstream concern, and its weights remain available for research.
Facts
- The takedown happened just two weeks before ChatGPT launched — a legendary near-miss in AI history.
- Critics got it to generate a wiki article on 'the history of bears in space.' Yann LeCun publicly defended it as the demo came down.
Try it yourself
galactica-1.3b on Hugging Face ↗ pip install galai ↗ Read the paper ↗
Lineage
Sources
arXiv ↗GitHub · paperswithcode/galai ↗