The secret to Sparrow, DeepMind's latest chatbot: Humans

DeepMind has trained a chatbot named Sparrow to be less toxic and more accurate than other systems, by using a mix of human feedback and Google search suggestions. Chatbots are typically powered by large language models (LLMs) trained on text scraped from the internet. These models are capable of generating paragraphs of prose that are, at a surface level at least, coherent and grammatically correct, and can respond to questions or written prompts from users. This software, however, often picks up bad traits from the source material resulting in it regurgitating offensive, racist, and sexist views, or spewing fake news or conspiracies that are often found on social media and internet forums. That said, these bots can be guided to generate safer output.