BlenderBot 3
Meta's open-domain chatbot research model that browses the web to stay current
BlenderBot 3 is an open-domain chatbot that Meta AI released in August 2022, built on top of Meta’s own OPT-175B language model and fine-tuned to hold conversations, search the web for current information, and remember details across sessions. At 175 billion parameters it was, at the time, the largest publicly released conversational AI model, and Meta made the code, model card, and training data available alongside it, in contrast to closed systems like OpenAI’s models. It was designed to keep improving from real conversations: Meta let members of the public chat with it and collected feedback to retrain and refine it over time, along with safety filters meant to catch toxic or unsafe responses. Full access to the 175B model was restricted to approved researchers, though smaller 3B and 30B versions were released more openly through Meta’s ParlAI framework. It was a research project rather than a commercial product, and its public demo was later shut down; today it’s mostly of historical interest as one of the last major “research chatbot” releases before ChatGPT reset expectations for what a conversational model should do.