Google has released a neural-network-powered chatbot called Meena that it claims is better than any other chatbot out there. From a report:
- Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes of public social-media chatter – 8.5 times as much data as OpenAI’s GPT-2. Google says Meena can talk about pretty much anything, and can even make up (bad) jokes. Open-ended conversation that covers a wide range of topics is hard, and most chatbots can’t keep up.
At some point most say things that make no sense or reveal a lack of basic knowledge about the world. A chatbot that avoids such mistakes will go a long way toward making AIs feel more human, and make characters in video games more lifelike. To put Meena to the test, Google has developed a new metric it calls the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures important attributes for natural conversations, such as whether each utterance makes sense in context – which many chatbots can do – and is specific to what has just been said, which is harder.
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