Google’s LaMDA Makes Conversations With AIs More Conversational

As far as AI systems have come in their ability to recognize what you’re saying and respond, they’re still very easily confused unless you speak carefully and literally. Google has been working on a new language model called LaMDA that’s much better at following conversations in a natural way, rather than as a series of badly formed search queries.

LaMDA is meant to be able to converse normally about almost anything without any kind of prior training. This was demonstrated in a pair of rather bizarre conversations with an AI first pretending to be Pluto and then a paper airplane.

While the utility of having a machine learning model that can pretend to be a planet (or dwarf planet, a term it clearly resents) is somewhat limited, the point of the demonstration was to show that LaMDA could carry on a conversation naturally even on this random topic, and in the arbitrary fashion of the first person.