Inside The Machine Learning that Google Used to Build Meena: A Chatbot that Can Chat About Anything

It seems that every year Google plans to shock the artificial intelligence(AI) world with new astonishing progress in natural language understanding(NLU) systems. Last year, the BERT model definitely stole the headlines of the NLU research space. Just a few weeks into 2020, Google Research published a new paper introducing Meena, a new deep learning model that can power chatbots that can engage in conversations about any domain. NLU has been one of the most active areas of research of the last few years and have produced some of the most widely adopted AI systems to date. However, despite all the progress, most conversational systems remain highly constrained to a specific domain which contrasts with our ability as humans to naturally converse about different topics.