Meta's BlenderBot 3 wants to chat – but can you trust it?

Last week, researchers at Facebook's parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3, a "publicly available chatbot that improves its skills and safety over time". The chatbot is built on top of Meta's OPT-175B language model, effectively the company's white-label version of the more famous GPT-3 AI. Like most state-of-the-art AIs these days, that was trained on a vast corpus of text scraped from the internet in questionable ways, and poured into a datacentre with thousands of expensive chips that turned the text into something approaching coherence. But where OPT-175B is a general-purpose textbot, able to do anything from write fiction and answer questions to generate spam emails, BlenderBot 3 is a narrower project: it can have a conversation with you. That focus allows it to bring in other expertise, though, and one of Meta's most significant successes is hooking the language model up to the broader internet.