Good question. I think they probably meant "publicly available," not "public domain." Maybe one could make an educated guess about which platforms they took data from, based on the sample outputs of their model? I can't tell, myself.

Samples here: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/mast...

"Human 1: There is sports tournament (badminton + tennis + basketball) organized by google next week. Would you like to volunteer for these events? Human 2: what does a volunteer do?"

later

"Human 1: Perfect! We have a meeting today at 4.30 pm. Is it fine if i add you to it? Human 2: yes happy to help"

I'd say in this conversation Human 1 and 2 are Google employees.

Definitely sounds like Google employees chatting anonymously with each other via some service for training the AI. Been reading a few and many conversations have pointers that make it seem they are IT professionals but from different areas in some global environment. Sounds like a internal Google experiment. (Edit: last example makes it pretty clear that it's was run internally to Google)

Seems not all life is happy, wherever the samples come from.

> I used to be a Java advocate. But you know, it doesn't do a good job in the AI days. It really makes me sad

===

Human 1: Nice to meet you! Is this your first time doing something like this?

Human 2: Yes, interesting task! When did you start with the team?

Human 1: I have been with the company for over 3 years. Stick with the same team What about you?

Human 2: Great to know! I joined the project earlier in the year. I think we should sync later for lunch.

===

Human 1: Hi!

Human 2: hey, what's up?

Human 1: What do you think about human like chat bots?

Human 2: I can't wait for them to be great conversationalists!

Human 1: Yep, we seemed to have made some great progress over last few years. Do you think the positives outweigh the negatives

Human 2: are there even any negatives? what are they?

Human 1: Like impersorsination? Though it sounds far fetched :)

===

Human 1: Hi!

Human 2: Hello!

Human 1: There is sports tournament (badminton + tennis + basketball) organized by google next week. Would you like to volunteer for these events?

Human 2: what does a volunteer do?

Human 1: Volunteers have to book the place before the event, send out details of the event to participants, handle some logistics and ensure everything goes smoothly. It will be fun!

Human 2: That sounds fun, I hope I get to participate as well

Human 1: Great! Do you have any preference for any of these events?

Seems they gathered the data themselves and releasing it public domain, so now it is. At least from what I can gather in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174464

Apparently threads of length 7 so maybe twitter threads or reddit. It s not clear from the text if they used the evaluators of the model to generate threads

Maybe Twitter? It's got a fairly conversational tone.

If typing random letters into Google translate taught me anything. Emails and anything stored in the Google cloud or device.

Perfect username for that lol.