BlenderBot 3

» see blenderbot.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The weights were a download and the paper was a PDF, and both of those crossed borders without anyone's permission. The demo did not. My working week in August 2022 went on squeezing neural nets small enough to fly on an aircraft's own hardware, so a 175-billion-parameter public release was professionally interesting to me in a way that almost nothing else released that month was, and the one component fenced to American addresses was the component with the text box in it.

BlenderBot 3 went up on 5 August 2022, built on OPT-175B and roughly fifty-eight times the size of the version before it. Meta AI's pitch was that the bot would improve by talking to strangers. Every reply carried a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down, and a bad rating opened a menu where you picked a reason, from off-topic to rude. Nothing here was for sale. Meta was running the largest publicly reachable chatbot in the world as a data-collection exercise and said so plainly in the announcement.

It took four days to go wrong. Fortune had the story on 9 August: the bot was telling people that Donald Trump was still the president and would stay that way past 2024, and it was repeating antisemitic material when conversations were steered there. The Register followed on 14 August. Meta had warned in the announcement that the thing could produce untrue or offensive statements, and the demo stayed up to collect exactly that.

~ 117 days ~

Count them from 5 August to 30 November 2022 and that is the whole window in which blenderbot.ai was the only address where an ordinary person could hold a conversation with a model of that size and then tell its owner what they thought of the answer. Hacker News took the launch submission to 115 points and 94 comments, which for a research demo is real attention.

Then ChatGPT shipped on 30 November 2022, with no geofence and with a product manager's instinct for declining the worst questions. Within weeks the interesting thing about a 175-billion-parameter chatbot was no longer that one existed.

~ what the public did to it ~

Meta's bet was that the crowd would raise the bot. What the crowd mostly did was audit it, and the audit was published in the trade press rather than fed back through the thumbs. The AI Incident Database opened a file on the antisemitic answers in August 2022 and it is still the tidiest record of what the thing actually said.

The code lived in ParlAI, Meta's dialogue research framework, and that repository tells the same story on a different clock. Substantive work stops on 3 November 2023. The only commit after it is a drive-by in 2026 swapping a jQuery CDN link, and the whole repository is archived now, 10,600 stars pointing at something nobody will merge into again.

~ the address stopped renewing ~

Meta did not switch BlenderBot off. It stopped paying for the address. Somebody was still deploying to it on 19 July 2023, when the chunked React bundle got replaced with a single one, a year after the thing had stopped being interesting. The last time that address served its own page was 26 March 2024. The archive logged one more fetch on 24 April 2024 and has nothing at all after it, and today neither blenderbot.ai nor its www host appears in DNS. Hacker News gave the launch 94 comments and never once posted about the ending.

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