Meta’s AI research labs have reportedly created a new state-of-the-art chatbot and the tech giant is letting members of the public talk to the system to collect feedback on its capabilities.
According to The Verge, the bot is called BlenderBot 3 and can be accessed on the web. Though, right now, it seems only residents in the US can do so.
“We are committed to publicly releasing all the data we collect in the demo in the hopes that we can improve conversational AI,” Kurt Shuster, a research engineer at Meta who helped create BlenderBot 3, was quoted as saying.
BlenderBot 3 is able to engage in general chitchat, said Meta, but also answer the sort of queries you might ask a digital assistant, “from talking about healthy food recipes to finding child-friendly amenities in the city”, the report said.
The bot is a prototype and built on Meta’s previous work with what are known as large language models or LLMS powerful but flawed text-generation software of which OpenAI’s GPT-3 is the most widely known example.
Like all LLMs, BlenderBot is initially trained on vast text datasets, which it mines for statistical patterns to generate language.
Such systems have proved extremely flexible and have been put to a range of uses, from generating code for programmers to helping authors write their next bestseller.
However, these models also have serious flaws: they regurgitate biases in their training data and often invent answers to users’ questions (a big problem if they are going to be useful as digital assistants).
