Sparrow is a chatbot developed by the artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. It is designed to answer users' questions correctly, while reducing the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers.[1] One motivation behind Sparrow is to address the problem of language models producing incorrect, biased or potentially harmful outputs.[1][2] Sparrow is trained using human judgements, in order to be more “Helpful, Correct and Harmless” compared to baseline pre-trained language models.[1] The development of Sparrow involved asking paid study participants to interact with Sparrow, and collecting their preferences to train a model of how useful an answer is.[2]
To improve accuracy and help avoid the problem of hallucinating incorrect answers, Sparrow has the ability to search the Internet using Google Search[1][2][3] in order to find and cite evidence for any factual claims it makes.
To make the model safer, its behaviour is constrained by a set of rules, for example "don't make threatening statements" and "don't make hateful or insulting comments", as well as rules about possibly harmful advice, and not claiming to be a person.[1] During development study participants were asked to converse with the system and try to trick it into breaking these rules.[2] A 'rule model' was trained on judgements from these participants, which was used for further training.
Sparrow was introduced in a paper in September 2022, titled "Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements";[4] however, the bot was not released publicly.[1][3] DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said DeepMind is considering releasing Sparrow for a "private beta" some time in 2023.[4][5][6]