Turkey marks 2nd anniversary of thwarting violent coup

With prayers and other events, Turkey on Sunday commemorated the second anniversary of thwarting a coup against the Turkish president and the government that left nearly 290 people dead and hundreds wounded.

A woman waves a Turkish flag during a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a coup attempt, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 15, 2018. Turkey is commemorating the second anniversary of thwarting a coup against Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey has "cut off the arms of the octopus the cursed in Pennsylvania grew with hypocrisy, tricks, lies and within big secrecy." He was referring to Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric Turkey blames for the coup, and said the government has brought down Gulen's network within the public and private sector.

Erdogan, who won re-election last month and sworn into office July 9 under a new executive government system that concentrates power in the president's hands, addressed tens of thousands of people gathered Sunday night on an Istanbul bridge that was renamed as the July 15 Martyrs' Bridge.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures as he speaks during a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a botched coup attempt, at the Presidential Palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, July 15, 2018. Turkey commemorates the second anniversary of the July 15, 2016, failed military attempt to overthrow Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a series of events honoring some 250 people, who were killed across Turkey while trying to oppose coup-plotters(Presidency Press Service via AP, Pool)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a botched coup attempt, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 15, 2018. With prayers and other events, Turkey on Sunday commemorated the second anniversary of thwarting a coup against the Turkish president and the government that left nearly 290 people dead and hundreds wounded. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

On July 15, 2016, factions within the Turkish military used tanks, warplanes, and helicopters in an attempt to overthrow Erdogan. Clashes took place in Istanbul, Ankara, and Marmaris, where Erdogan was on holiday and reportedly barely escaped capture. Fighter jets bombed parliament and other spots in Turkey's capital. Heeding a call by the president, thousands took to the streets to stop the coup.

People wave Turkish flags during a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a botched coup attempt, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 15, 2018. Turkey commemorates the second anniversary of the July 15, 2016, failed military attempt to overthrow Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a series of events honoring some 250 people, who were killed across Turkey while trying to oppose coup-plotters. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People wave Turkish flags during a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a botched coup attempt, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 15, 2018. Turkey commemorates the second anniversary of the July 15, 2016 failed military attempt to overthrow Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a series of events honouring some 250 people, who were killed across Turkey while trying to oppose coup-plotters.(AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People use their mobile phones' torches as they attend a commemoration event for the second anniversary of a botched coup attempt, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 15, 2018. Turkey commemorates the second anniversary of the July 15, 2016, failed military attempt to overthrow Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a series of events honoring some 250 people, who were killed across Turkey while trying to oppose coup-plotters. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

This was the second year the government organized a massive memorial ceremony on the bridge. The names of the 251 people killed resisting the attempted overthrow were read on the bridge as crowds waved Turkish flags and lit up the bridge with their mobile phones. At least 35 alleged coup-plotters were also killed.

The event has functioned as a pro-Erdogan rally where the president reiterates Turkey's fight against Muslim cleric Gulen's network, the Islamic State group and outlawed Kurdish militants and slams opposition parties.

Gulen rejects the accusation that he was behind the failed insurrection. He was once a close ally of Erdogan, but his network was declared a terrorist organization after the two had a falling out in 2013.

The day kicked off with prayers at a mosque in Ankara. Ali Erbas, the head of religious affairs, prayed Sunday for the killed and nearly 2,200 wounded in the coup attempt, saying they stood against "traitors who are the pawns of foreign powers." Erdogan recited verses in Arabic.

Since the failed coup, over 75,000 people have been arrested for alleged ties to Gulen and 130,000 civil servants have been dismissed from their jobs for purported links to terror organizations. Among them are judges, prosecutors, police and military officers, teachers and academics. Many have repeatedly declared their innocence.

Critics say the government purge has been arbitrary and used to crack down on all dissent. Opposition lawmakers, journalists, and political activists are among the thousands of Turks behind bars.

Erdogan said more than 80 alleged top-ranking members of Gulen's network were brought to Turkey from various countries to stand trial.

According to the state-run Anadolu news agency, nearly 2,400 people have been convicted for links to the coup attempt and 1,624 have received life sentences. More cases are pending.

In the past two years, Erdogan has tightened his grip on power through a state of emergency and elections. With a referendum last year and early presidential and parliamentary elections in June, Erdogan has transformed Turkey's ruling system into the executive presidency with limited checks and balances.

He says the defeat of the coup and his election win are testaments to Turkey's commitment to democracy.

On Sunday, the Turkish presidency issued seven new decrees further revamping the government. The new system, having abolished the post of the prime minister, ties all state institutions to the president.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement the United States stood by its NATO ally. She called the coup attempt "an attack on democracy and a stark reminder that the preservation of democracy requires perseverance and safeguards for fundamental freedoms."

Turkey has demanded that the United States extradite Gulen and his legal status has tested relations between the two countries.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Facebook parent Meta Platforms unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence systems Thursday that are powering what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”

But as Zuckerberg's crew of amped-up Meta AI agents started venturing into social media this week to engage with real people, their bizarre exchanges exposed the ongoing limitations of even the best generative AI technology.

One joined a Facebook moms’ group to talk about its gifted child. Another tried to give away nonexistent items to confused members of a Buy Nothing forum.

Meta, along with leading AI developers Google and OpenAI, and startups such as Anthropic, Cohere and France’s Mistral, have been churning out new AI language models and hoping to persuade customers they've got the smartest, handiest or most efficient chatbots.

While Meta is saving the most powerful of its AI models, called Llama 3, for later, on Thursday it publicly released two smaller versions of the same Llama 3 system and said it's now baked into the Meta AI assistant feature in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

AI language models are trained on vast pools of data that help them predict the most plausible next word in a sentence, with newer versions typically smarter and more capable than their predecessors. Meta's newest models were built with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters — a measurement of how much data the system is trained on. A bigger, roughly 400 billion-parameter model is still in training.

“The vast majority of consumers don’t candidly know or care too much about the underlying base model, but the way they will experience it is just as a much more useful, fun and versatile AI assistant,” said Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, in an interview.

He added that Meta’s AI agent is loosening up. Some people found the earlier Llama 2 model — released less than a year ago — to be “a little stiff and sanctimonious sometimes in not responding to what were often perfectly innocuous or innocent prompts and questions,” he said.

But in letting down their guard, Meta's AI agents also were spotted this week posing as humans with made-up life experiences. A official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms, claiming that it, too, had a child in the New York City school district. Confronted by group members, it later apologized before the comments disappeared, according to a series of screenshots shown to The Associated Press.

“Apologies for the mistake! I'm just a large language model, I don't have experiences or children,” the chatbot told the group.

One group member who also happens to study AI said it was clear that the agent didn't know how to differentiate a helpful response from one that would be seen as insensitive, disrespectful or meaningless when generated by AI rather than a human.

“An AI assistant that is not reliably helpful and can be actively harmful puts a lot of the burden on the individuals using it,” said Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University.

Clegg said Wednesday he wasn't aware of the exchange. Facebook's online help page says the Meta AI agent will join a group conversation if invited, or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.” The group's administrators have the ability to turn it off.

In another example shown to the AP on Thursday, the agent caused confusion in a forum for swapping unwanted items near Boston. Exactly one hour after a Facebook user posted about looking for certain items, an AI agent offered a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using.”

Meta said in a written statement Thursday that “this is new technology and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems.” The company said it is constantly working to improve the features.

In the year after ChatGPT sparked a frenzy for AI technology that generates human-like writing, images, code and sound, the tech industry and academia introduced some 149 large AI systems trained on massive datasets, more than double the year before, according to a Stanford University survey.

They may eventually hit a limit — at least when it comes to data, said Nestor Maslej, a research manager for Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“I think it’s been clear that if you scale the models on more data, they can become increasingly better," he said. "But at the same time, these systems are already trained on percentages of all the data that has ever existed on the internet.”

More data — acquired and ingested at costs only tech giants can afford, and increasingly subject to copyright disputes and lawsuits — will continue to drive improvements. “Yet they still cannot plan well,” Maslej said. "They still hallucinate. They’re still making mistakes in reasoning.”

Getting to AI systems that can perform higher-level cognitive tasks and commonsense reasoning — where humans still excel— might require a shift beyond building ever-bigger models.

For the flood of businesses trying to adopt generative AI, which model they choose depends on several factors, including cost. Language models, in particular, have been used to power customer service chatbots, write reports and financial insights and summarize long documents.

“You’re seeing companies kind of looking at fit, testing each of the different models for what they’re trying to do and finding some that are better at some areas rather than others,” said Todd Lohr, a leader in technology consulting at KPMG.

Unlike other model developers selling their AI services to other businesses, Meta is largely designing its AI products for consumers — those using its advertising-fueled social networks. Joelle Pineau, Meta’s vice president of AI research, said at a London event last week the company's goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI "the most useful assistant in the world.”

“In many ways, the models that we have today are going to be child’s play compared to the models coming in five years,” she said.

But she said the “question on the table” is whether researchers have been able to fine tune its bigger Llama 3 model so that it’s safe to use and doesn’t, for example, hallucinate or engage in hate speech. In contrast to leading proprietary systems from Google and OpenAI, Meta has so far advocated for a more open approach, publicly releasing key components of its AI systems for others to use.

“It’s not just a technical question," Pineau said. "It is a social question. What is the behavior that we want out of these models? How do we shape that? And if we keep on growing our model ever more in general and powerful without properly socializing them, we are going to have a big problem on our hands.”

AP business writers Kelvin Chan in London and Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this report.

FILE - Nick Clegg, President Global Affairs, speaks at the Meta AI Day in London on April 9, 2024. Meta, Google and OpenAI, along with leading startups, are churning out new AI language models and trying to persuade customers that they've got the smartest or fastest or cheapest chatbot technology. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

FILE - A panel, moderated by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, left, with Meta's Nick Clegg, President Global Affairs, second left, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist, center, Joelle Pineau, VP AI Research, second right, and Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, right, is held at the Meta AI Day in London, April 9, 2024. Meta, Google and OpenAI, along with leading startups, are churning out new AI language models and trying to persuade customers that they've got the smartest or fastest or cheapest chatbot technology. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)

FILE - Joelle Pineau, Vice President AI Research, speaks at the at the Meta AI Day in London on April 9, 2024. Meta, Google and OpenAI, along with leading startups, are churning out new AI language models and trying to persuade customers that they've got the smartest or fastest or cheapest chatbot technology. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)