Ongoing work was meant to ensure it meets Google’s high standards for fairness, accuracy, safety, and privacy, “consistent with AI principles.” That’s important to test for and control because LaMDA’s answers to questions could become a source of facts for some people, depending on where and how it ends up being used. In 2021, Pichai said it was still “early research” and under active development, but that the company had been using it internally to “explore novel interactions” and improve the language processing skills of other voice-powered tools like Search, Google Assistant, and Workspace. As an example, a question about the gravity on Pluto had it responding about jumping high and practicing its flips (Pluto jumping on Pluto) or playing fetch with the Moon. Some of its answers bordered on nonsensical, with it losing its frame of reference in lines of questioning where it’s meant to be an object.

But even this early version of LaMDA had drawbacks. That means LaMDA-as-Pluto is the same LaMDA that can answer questions about history or the weather. It’s what’s called an “open domain” model. As Pichai stressed in the presentation, this isn’t the sort of chatbot that responds to a question about the weather with a set of numbers it’s got a little more style or perspective and is better able to model how we actually use language.Īnother big benefit to LaMDA is that it’s a single model that doesn’t have to be re-trained for different conversations or subjects.

One demonstration that Google showed included LaMDA speaking from the perspective of the demoted solar satellite Pluto, advising someone on how to dress if they visit and when the last time they had guests was, while sprinkling in a little salt about the lack of respect that dwarf planets get. Google said at the time that it had been trained only on text, meaning LaMDA can’t create or respond to things like images, audio, or video (though Google was actively planning to expand those capabilities).Īt the time, LaMDA was just a novel curiosity with an impressive ability to parse questions and generate surprisingly spontaneous answers that escaped the realm of pure fact. The name literally stands for “ Language Model for Dialogue Applications.” At its core, it’s basically a machine learning-powered chatbot designed to speak generally about any topic, sort of like IBM’s Watson loaded up with a wide-ranging set of facts, but enhanced with better language understanding and language-generation skills.

Meena chatbot try online