Earlier this year, Google unveiled AI Test Kitchen -- an Android app that lets users talk to one of its most advanced AI chatbots, LaMDA 2. Today, the company is opening up registrations for early access. You can sign up here, and Google says it will soon be letting people download the app and start chatting. It's interesting, considering that Meta made an almost identical move just earlier this month, opening up its latest and greatest AI chatbot, BlenderBot 3, for public consumption. Of course, people quickly found that they could get BlenderBot to say creepy or untruthful things (or even criticize the bot's nominal boss, Mark Zuckerberg), but that's kind of the whole point of releasing these demos. As Mary Williamson, a research engineering manager at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), told me at the beginning of the month, many companies don't like to test their chatbots in the wild because what they say will be damaging to the company, as with Microsoft's Tay.

During the first of two Google I/O keynotes this week, Google announced LaMDA 2, the follow-up to an AI system, LaMDA, that the company introduced at Google I/O 2021. Short for Language Models for Dialog Applications, Google claims that LaMDA 2 can break down complex topics into straightforward, digestible explanations and steps as well as generate suggestions in response to questions. LaMDA 2, an AI system built for "dialogue applications," can understand millions of topics and generate "natural conversations" that never take the same path twice, Google says. Like most AI systems, LaMDA 2 learns how likely words are to occur in a body of text -- usually a sentence -- based on many, many examples of text. Examples come in the form of documents within training datasets, which contain terabytes to petabytes of data scraped from social media, Wikipedia, books, software hosting platforms like GitHub, and other sources on the public web.

Google is announcing news at breakneck pace at its I/O developer conference today, and as usual it's flexing its machine-learning smarts. In addition to unveiling its new LaMDA 2 conversational AI model, the company also showed off a new app called AI Test Kitchen. The app offers three demos that showcase what LaMDA 2 can do. The first is a simple brainstorm tool that asks the app to help you imagine if you were in various scenarios. During the keynote demo, Google entered "I'm at the deepest part of the ocean" as a response to the app's prompt of "Imagine if."