Facebook Blender Chatbot Does Open Source

Anything that can make a chatbot more conversational, and have the ability to use and update context
continually is good. 

Facebook releases its 'Blender' chatbot as an open-source project
It could help tomorrow's AI converse more naturally with people

Andrew Tarantola, @terrortola in Engadget

The virtual assistants that inhabit our smartphones are helpful, sure, but they’re not going to pass the Turing test any time soon. They’re designed for understanding specific commands and actions like checking on restaurant reservations or getting updates on the weather, rather than, say, carrying on an in-depth conversation with a human. But chatbots could soon become far more loquacious thanks to Facebook, which this morning released a startlingly lifelike chatbot that it’s been developing, dubbed Blender, as an open-source resource for AI research.

Facebook has been pouring money and resources into its Natural Language Processing technologies for a few years now and those efforts appear to have paid off. The company claims that Blender is the single largest open-source chatbot created to date. It’s been trained on a whopping 9.4 billion parameters -- nearly 4x as many as Google’s Meena and more than 10x as many as the previous largest OS chatbot available on the internet.

“One of the recent findings in the area of NLP, and AI in general, has been that as you scale, as these neural network models larger and larger, they tend to perform better,” Stephen Roller, a research engineer at Facebook’s AI lab (FAIR), told Engadget. “We had a number of issues when we were trying to train this thing. When you start to get that large, these things no longer are able to fit on a single GPU anymore.”  .... "

See more on their Blended Talk Ability.