Financial Times tests Ask FT, a chatbot trained on decades of its own articles

this Financial Times There is a new generative artificial intelligence chatbot called Ask FT that can answer questions from subscribers. Similar to generalized AI bots such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, users can expect curated natural language answers to whatever they want to know, but the answers come from decades of information published by the medium rather than being difficult to interpret or Unexplainable origin. Subject to ongoing legal proceedings. So don’t expect it to give you the answer to the best recipe for fettuccine alfredo.

When we asked “Who runs Microsoft’s AI products?” the tool returned the latest answer, referencing this week’s news that Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its new AI team:

Mustafa Suleyman currently serves as head of Microsoft AI, responsible for managing Microsoft’s consumer-facing AI products and departments, reporting directly to Satya Nadella [1,2,3].He was hired from Inflection AI to expand Microsoft’s focus on developing generative artificial intelligence for individual consumer use [1,2,3,4,6].

The numbers in brackets correspond to Financial Times The article it extracts information from and lists it below the answer. It also provides the time period in which the articles were written. In this Microsoft question, it said it pulled information from March 1, 2023, to March 20, 2024.

However, we found some inconsistencies in the answers. When we tested it, the tool included Nikki Haley in the answer to our question about who is currently running for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, even though she has dropped out of the race.

It is available to hundreds of paying subscribers Financial Times Professional grade, for business professionals and institutions. Ask FT is currently powered by Claude, a large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic, but this may change.during an interview edge, Financial Times Chief product officer manager Lindsey Jayne said the store is “approaching this in a ‘model agnostic’ way to see which one best meets our needs.”

It can answer questions about current events, such as how much funding Intel received from the U.S. government under the CHIPS Act, as well as broader questions, such as the impact of cryptocurrencies on the environment.The tool then collects Financial Timesfiles and summarize relevant information in the form of citations.

Ask FT will also answer questions that require digging into the FT archives. When asked how YouTube started, it correctly replied that it was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.

“We do a lot of testing internally and use it to refine the way we guide models and the way we build code,” Jayne said. “In the first set of 500 questions, we are tracking every question and response, as well as user feedback.”

Last year, we tried similar tools deployed by marketing company Foundry’s digital store, including Mike world, computer worldand Technical Adviser. However, at the time it wasn’t as useful as Ask FT; my colleague Mia Sato found that it provided inaccurate results for simple questions such as when the last iPod Nano was released.

“If you don’t evolve and meet these moments, I don’t think you’re going to be a 135-year-old institution,” Jayne said. “But you have to be smart and not just jump on the hype train…otherwise people just play it for the novelty and move on with their lives.”

Most subscribers can’t try out the chatbot yet. Ask FT is still in beta because Financial Times Continue to test and evaluate it.