Facebook have launched a brand new chatbot. It’s called Facebook Blender and it is insanely powerful and very very humanlike. It’s able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality.

Facebook Blender was trained by using available public domain conversations. The conversations that were analysed? 1.5billion different human exchanges. HUGE! In a surprising stat, 49% of people prefer to interact with the chatbot compared with another human!

However, artificial intelligence experts state that using a platform such as Reddit does come with drawbacks. As Facebook Blender would sometimes respond using foul and offensive language, while at other times it would make up facts.

Though researches hope that further models of Blender would address this. A Facebook spokesperson told the BBC:

“We believe that releasing models is essential to enable full, reliable insights into their capabilities,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Artificial Intelligence expert Dave Coplin, chief executive of consultancy The Envisioners, said that Blender was a “step in the right direction,”

“The first is just how complex it is to replicate all of the nuances of a human attribute, like the ability to hold a conversation, a skill that most three-year-olds can master,”

“The second is around the relationship with the data used to train the model and the results generated by the model.

“As great a platform as Reddit is, training algorithms based on the conversations you find there is going to get you a lot of chaff amongst the wheat.”

Facebook also compared Blender’s performance with the latest version of Meena, Google’s version of a chatbot. It showed 2 sets of conversations, one made with Blender the other Meena. These conversations included different conversations such as movies or veganism. Facebook said that 67% of respondents thought Blender sounded more humanlike than Meena.

“We achieved this milestone through a new chatbot recipe that includes improved decoding techniques, novel blending of skills, and a model with 9.4 billion parameters, which is 3.6x more than the largest existing system.

“This is the first chatbot to blend a diverse set of conversational skills together in one system.”

“Building a truly intelligent dialogue agent that can chat like a human remains one of the largest open challenges in AI today.”

Facebook Blender Example Conversations

(BBC)

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