Meta is putting its latest AI chatbot on the web for the public to talk to

Meta's AI research labs have created a new state-of-the-art chatbot and are letting members of the public talk to the system in order to collect feedback on its capabilities. The bot is called BlenderBot 3 and can be accessed on the web. BlenderBot 3 is able to engage in general chitchat, says 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 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 datasets of text, which it mines for statistical patterns in order to generate language.