Meta is asking the public for help with its chatbot - thats never gone wrong before

Date:
Fri, 05 Aug 2022 17:04:15 +0000

Description:
Meta has launched BlenderBot 3 and is looking for help from people in the US to make it smarter but history tells us this could go wrong.

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Meta has just unveiled the third version of its AI chatbot and you can talk
to it right now.

Taking a break from its usual updates about the Oculus Quest 2 or ways itll ruin Instagram next , Meta has announced BlenderBot 3 a follow-up to its previous prototype bots BlenderBot and BlenderBot 2.

By heading to the blenderbot.ai webpage you can ask BlenderBot questions like its a search engine or you can chat with it as you would a friend. If you use its search features, BlenderBot will not only provide you with the answer you wanted but will share where it got its information from, letting you click through to find out more.

Unfortunately, there is one restriction on who can chat to Metas new bot: you have to be in the US. Some of our writers tried using Express VPN to spoof their location from the UK, but were unsuccessful however, you may find a different VPN is able to break through Metas location barrier. Risky business

AI chatbots have a less than stellar track record when it comes to
interacting with the general public

Famously Microsoft released a Twitter chatbot back in 2016 called Tay which nefarious users quickly hijacked. Tay was designed to learn from the users that chatted with it. However, a concerted effort to spam Tay with hateful messages warped the bots responses.

Just 16 hours after being switched on, Tay was taken offline . The vast majority of its Twitter accounts tweets were deleted because they were filled with racist, homophobic and misogynistic filth. Please don't corrupt BlenderBot 3, it looks so cute (Image credit: Meta)

Thankfully, Metas chatbot will likely be less prone to hijacking as it wont regurgitate users comments to it. Instead, it will rely on data researchers previously fed it. This so-called large language model (LLM) approach to AI can help to create some competent bots like the hugely popular DALL-E Mini but they have other flaws that Meta is hoping to solve in its search for a reliable digital assitant.

If an LLM AI doesnt have an answer to your question in its database, itll often do what every parent does when their kid starts quizzing them about a topic they know nothing about itll make something up. Meta hopes its new bot will be able to get around this problem by using the internet to find answers to some questions, though Meta also wants to make sure its bot is serving up the right information from reliable sources.

Thats where you come in. Users that test out BlenderBot 3 are asked to
provide feedback should they choose to opt into having their data collected.

Well have to wait and see how Metas experiment goes but if youre a developer looking to delve into the mechanics behind BlenderBot 3, you can check out
its underlying code and training dataset which Meta has shared on ParlAI .
You can even request access to the largest available model copy of BlenderBot 3 through a Google Form .

If you want to check out some other fun AI, here are the seven best masterpieces created by DALL-E Mini .

(via The Verge )



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/meta-is-asking-the-public-for-help-with-its-cha tbot-thats-never-gone-wrong-before/


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