DeepMind's new chatbot uses Google searches plus humans to give better answers

The difference between this approach and its predecessors is that DeepMind hopes to use "dialogue in the long term for safety," says Geoffrey Irving, a safety researcher at DeepMind. "That means we don't expect that the problems that we face in these models--either misinformation or stereotypes or whatever--are obvious at first glance, and we want to talk through them in detail. And that means between machines and humans as well," he says. DeepMind's idea of using human preferences to optimize how an AI model learns is not new, says Sara Hooker, who leads Cohere for AI, a nonprofit AI research lab. "But the improvements are convincing and show clear benefits to human-guided optimization of dialogue agents in a large-language-model setting," says Hooker. Douwe Kiela, a researcher at AI startup Hugging Face, says Sparrow is "a nice next step that follows a general trend in AI, where we are more seriously trying to improve the safety aspects of large-language-model deployments."