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

Facebook's parent company has created a bot capable of weighing in on almost any topic - from radicalisation to sending Mark Zuckerberg to jail

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. In other words: BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic."