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by patresh 1631 days ago
There is a fundamental difference between AI Dungeon-type chatbots and chatbots you typically encounter on websites e.g. for customer support.

The former does not really have a goal and is unconcerned about responding with factual information as long as the conversation is coherent. It makes sense to use large language models that are quite good at modeling next word probabilities based on context.

The latter however is goal-oriented (help the customer) and constrained by its known actions and embedded knowledge. This often forces the conversational flows (or at least fragments) to be hard-coded and machine-learning is used as a compass to determine which flow to trigger next.

For now controlling GPT-like language models remains an extremely tricks exercise but if some day we can constrain language models to only output desirable and factual information with a low cost in maintaining and updating its embedded knowledge, we should see a significant bump in "intelligence" of the typical website chatbot.