Facebook's AI Chatbot Displays Empathy and Personality

Facebook claims to have created an artificial intelligence chatbot that can display empathy, personality and knowledge.

AI and chatbots don’t always go together in a positive way. Microsoft famously created “Tay,” a chatbot that used Twitter to interact with people. Within 24 hours, however, Microsoft had to shut it down because the bot had become a lewd, racist, Nazi.

Facebook believes it has achieved what Microsoft didn’t, and even believes it has surpassed Google’s attempts at a human-esque chatbot. Facebook’s chatbot, “Blender,” was trained using 1.5 billion Reddit posts to help it gain the full range of human conversational interaction.

According to BBC News, training Blender via Reddit has had disadvantages, including the chatbot using offensive language and sometimes making up facts. In spite of that, Blender still succeeded in sounding more human than Google’s chatbot.

“We achieved this milestone through a new chatbot recipe that includes improved decoding techniques, novel blending of skills, and a model with 9.4 billion parameters, which is 3.6x more than the largest existing system,” a Facebook spokesperson told BBC.

“This is the first chatbot to blend a diverse set of conversational skills together in one system.”

“Building a truly intelligent dialogue agent that can chat like a human remains one of the largest open challenges in AI today.”