We Interviewed Meta’s New AI Chatbot About … Itself

Releasing a new artificial intelligence system that learns from people on the internet can be a risky proposition. Just ask Microsoft’s “teen” chatbot Tay—except you can’t, because Tay was taken down when it started reproducing sexist and racist remarks shortly after it launched in 2016. The company just announced BlenderBot 3, a much more advanced chatbot designed to learn through conversation without getting into the kind of trouble that derailed Tay. Meta’s technology also uses advances in AI that have produced much more linguistically capable computer programs in recent years. Training a particular type of artificial neural network on huge amounts of text data scraped from the web can produce algorithms capable of summarizing or generating text and that are able to hold conversations that can be more coherent and wide-ranging than the canned remarks of conventional chatbots.