Facebook Claims That Their Chatbot Is The Best In The World

Technology and artificial intelligence has greatly improved throughout the years. But if there’s something that still has lots of room for improvement, it would be the AI’s ability to talk to humans. Chatbots and virtual assistants still suck at keeping conversations. But perhaps starting now, things will be different.

Now Facebook has open-sourced a new chatbot that it claims can talk about nearly anything in an engaging and interesting way. Blender could not only help virtual assistants resolve many of their shortcomings but also mark progress toward the greater ambition driving much of AI research: to replicate intelligence. “Dialogue is sort of an ‘AI complete’ problem,” says Stephen Roller, a research engineer at Facebook who co-led the project. “You would have to solve all of AI to solve dialogue, and if you solve dialogue, you’ve solved all of AI.”

More details about this story over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: Facebook/ Technology Review)

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Yes, "Mark Z." is a very convincing chat bot. Almost human! Yes, Edward, he is programmed to lie.

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One big issue with chat bots is that they are programmed to lie. Neither side of that conversation is telling anything truthful.

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Yeah, I don't think I've seen a conversation that used that many exclamation marks on both sides. They're getting better at not simply parroting back the question, but just barely. I wonder what kind of response it would have if the questions were about current events like the coronavirus, toilet paper availability, murder hornets, etc...
According to the article:

Blender also has a tendency to “hallucinate” knowledge, or make up facts—a direct limitation of the deep-learning techniques used to build it. It’s ultimately generating its sentences from statistical correlations rather than a database of knowledge. As a result, it can string together a detailed and coherent description of a famous celebrity, for example, but with completely false information.