Meta is asking the public for help with its chatbot – that’s never gone wrong before
Meta just unveiled the third version of its AI chatbot and you can now talk to it.
Taking a break from the usual updates about the Oculus Quest 2 or ways it will ruin Instagram after that, Meta has announced BlenderBot 3 – a sequel to its previous prototype bots BlenderBot and BlenderBot 2.
On to the blenderbot.ai webpage (opens in new tab) you can ask BlenderBot as if it were a search engine or you can chat with it like you would with a friend. If you use the search features, BlenderBot will not only give you the answer you want, but also share where it got its information from so you can click through to learn more.
Unfortunately, there is one limitation to who can chat with Meta’s new bot: you have to be in the US. Some of our writers tried to use Express VPN to fake their location from the UK but were unsuccessful – however, another VPN may be able to break Meta’s location barrier.
Risky business
AI chatbots have a less than stellar track record when it comes to interacting with the general public
Famously, in 2016, Microsoft released a Twitter chatbot called Tay, which was quickly hijacked by nefarious users. Tay is designed to learn from the users who chat with it. However, a concerted effort to spam Tay with hateful messages distorted the bot’s responses.
Just 16 hours after being turned on, Tay was taken offline. The vast majority of tweets from his Twitter account were deleted because they were filled with racist, homophobic and misogynistic filth.
Fortunately, Meta’s chatbot will likely be less prone to hijacking, as it won’t spit out users’ comments. Instead, it relies on data that researchers have previously given it. This so-called Large Language Model (LLM) approach to AI may help create some competent bots — like the hugely popular DALL-E Mini — but they have other shortcomings that Meta hopes to solve in its quest for a reliable one. digital assistant.
If an LLM AI doesn’t have an answer to your question in its database, it will often do what any parent does when their child starts questioning them about a topic they know nothing about – it will make something up. Meta hopes his new bot can get around this problem by using the internet to find answers to some questions, though Meta also wants to make sure his bot provides the right information from trusted sources.
That’s where you come in. Users testing BlenderBot 3 will be asked to provide feedback if they choose to have their data collected.
We’ll have to wait and see how Meta’s experiment goes, but if you’re a developer looking to delve into the mechanics behind BlenderBot 3, you can check out the underlying code and training dataset Meta shared at ParlAI (opens in new tab). You can even request access to the largest available model copy of BlenderBot 3 at a google form (opens in new tab).
If you want to check out some other fun AI, here are the seven best masterpieces created by DALL-E Mini.
(through The edge (opens in new tab))