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Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

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Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#41

Post by OmarShehata »

Aperocky wrote: post #36
RugnirViking wrote: post #27

From the very first sample conversation they released: - Human: Hi! - Meena: Hey there! What's up? - Human: Same old, Monday blues...what are you up to? - Meena: I'm procrastinating on a paper I'm supposed to be writing. - Human: are you thinking of pulling an all nighter? - Meena: Possibly. What's your paper on? The bot has already mistaken facts about its own crafted persona and the human in less than 2 meaningful…

Haha, indeed. I think we're trying to stretch too far here. We've always dreamt of having a conversation with a bot without actually constructing the intelligence behind that bot. And it's not going to work. We should start with something simpler, like cats, which definitely have feeling, but have a mental capacity that is closer to what we may be able to emulate through software. And then monitor progress through it…

This seems that a more complex approach, not simpler. To try to emulate a form of intelligence we don't understand and even worse, monitor its progress through some proxy interactions that don't tell us much.

Like if you're going to create a creature from scratch why create something that can't communicate with you?

Unless you mean we should just tackle simpler forms of intelligence in general, which is what the rest of the AI field outside of conversational AI are doing.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#43

Post by dekhn »

TACIXAT wrote: post #42

I would really like a bot that could summarize topics for me then drill down into specifics based on questions I had. Even if it was all just from the Wikipedia page. This would be so nice to triage information while driving.

i've thought of this many times. "Wikibot, tell me more about bridges of the 19th century." "Stop. Tell me more the Ponte delle Catene, Bagni di Lucca bridge"

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#45

Post by Aperocky »

OmarShehata wrote: post #41
Aperocky wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, indeed. I think we're trying to stretch too far here. We've always dreamt of having a conversation with a bot without actually constructing the intelligence behind that bot. And it's not going to work. We should start with something simpler, like cats, which definitely have feeling, but have a mental capacity that is closer to what we may be able to emulate through software. And then monitor progress through it…

This seems that a more complex approach, not simpler. To try to emulate a form of intelligence we don't understand and even worse, monitor its progress through some proxy interactions that don't tell us much. Like if you're going to create a creature from scratch why create something that can't communicate with you? Unless you mean we should just tackle simpler forms of intelligence in general, which is what the rest…

Basically your last sentence. You can't have an intelligent conversation with something that's fundamentally not intelligent. It could have recited the whole wikipedia but still be basically a query bot. Building more advanced query methods (e.g. use machine learning) doesn't solve that problem.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#46

Post by ProAm »

molteanu wrote: post #35

Chat about everything?! I cannot even do a decent search nowadays! The Google-sphere looks like a giant marketplace. If you're not buying or selling but just out for a stroll admiring the countryside, you're out of luck.

Meena: Did you say you are buying a stroller to use in the countryside? I was just looking at these: {url}(hip new stroller){AD}

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#47

Post by darepublic »

RugnirViking wrote: post #27

From the very first sample conversation they released: - Human: Hi! - Meena: Hey there! What's up? - Human: Same old, Monday blues...what are you up to? - Meena: I'm procrastinating on a paper I'm supposed to be writing. - Human: are you thinking of pulling an all nighter? - Meena: Possibly. What's your paper on? The bot has already mistaken facts about its own crafted persona and the human in less than 2 meaningful…

these nlp models are getting better and better but what we need ofc is for some model of the world to be constructed during the speech. If I tell you that yesterday I accidentally knocked a glass of water off the table and it fell on to soft carpet you could guess that it survived the fall without shattering. What we need is a chatbot that as you talk to it can update a 3d game/physics engine model from your words so that common sense implications of your statements can be gleaned. As you speak it will simulate what you are describing and then use info gathered from the simulation to draw conclusions.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#48

Post by sansnomme »

dekhn wrote: post #43
TACIXAT wrote: post #42

I would really like a bot that could summarize topics for me then drill down into specifics based on questions I had. Even if it was all just from the Wikipedia page. This would be so nice to triage information while driving.

i've thought of this many times. "Wikibot, tell me more about bridges of the 19th century." "Stop. Tell me more the Ponte delle Catene, Bagni di Lucca bridge"

Like most things in ML, the technological exists and theoretically works, but ymmv in production.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#49

Post by anentropic »

gambler wrote: post #10

In 2015 Google claimed to have created a chat bot that can do common-sense reasoning and do tech support just by reading a sufficiently large dataset: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v1.pdf

Meena: have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#50

Post by ur-whale »

darepublic wrote: post #47
RugnirViking wrote: post #27

From the very first sample conversation they released: - Human: Hi! - Meena: Hey there! What's up? - Human: Same old, Monday blues...what are you up to? - Meena: I'm procrastinating on a paper I'm supposed to be writing. - Human: are you thinking of pulling an all nighter? - Meena: Possibly. What's your paper on? The bot has already mistaken facts about its own crafted persona and the human in less than 2 meaningful…

these nlp models are getting better and better but what we need ofc is for some model of the world to be constructed during the speech. If I tell you that yesterday I accidentally knocked a glass of water off the table and it fell on to soft carpet you could guess that it survived the fall without shattering. What we need is a chatbot that as you talk to it can update a 3d game/physics engine model from your words so…

This
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