On April 29, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) announced that it has built and open-sourced a new chatbot Blender.

According to FAIR, Blender is the largest-ever open-domain chatbot. It is also the first chatbot built with a diverse set of conversational skills, including the ability to assume a persona, show empathy, and discuss nearly any topic. FAIR claims that Blender beats Google’s Meena as the best in the world.

Checkout Github and the Paper if you want to know more.

• GitHub: https://parl.ai/projects/blender/
• The Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13637

Beats Google’s as the best in the world

FAIR claims that Blender is the largest **_open-domain _**chatbot, and is the best in the world.

The pre-trained and fine-tuned Blender model is available on GitHub. The model contains up to 9.4 billion parameters, which is 3.6 times more than the largest existing system — Google’s latest chatbot Meena.

A conversation with Facebook Blender

When Google released Meena in January, Google called it the best chatbot in the world. Now, according to Facebook’s own pairwise human evaluations,

• 75% of evaluators found that Blender is more attractive than Meena,
• 67% of evaluators believe that Blender performs more like humans.
• 49% of evaluators cannot distinguish between chatbot Blender and real humans initially.

The main difference between the other chatbots and Blender is that Blender has the ability to assume a persona, show empathy, and discuss nearly any topic.

At the time of writing this article, Google has not yet commented on this claim.

#machine-learning #chatbots #facebook #artificial-intelligence