- GSA is partnering with OpenAI to provide federal agencies with ChatGPT
- These will cost each agency just $1 for the year
- AI models present serious environmental, security, and ‘hallucination’ concerns
OpenAI has announced it has partnered with the US General Services Administration (GSA) to offer ChatGPT Enterprise for the entire federal executive branch workforce at ‘essentially no cost’ meaning just $1 per agency for the next 12 months.
“Helping government work better – making services faster, easier, and more reliable—is a key way to bring the benefits of AI to everyone,” the company said.
“At OpenAI, we believe public servants should help shape how AI is used. The best way to do that is to put best-in-class AI tools in their hands—with strong guardrails, high transparency, and deep respect for their public mission.”
Tools and training
OpenAI was also awarded a $200 million US defence contract to provide AI data collection, admin, and ‘proactive cyber defense’ tools. This contract aims to bring AI to the forefront of defense, looking to ‘improve both the day-to-day experience of public service and to help government employees feel more empowered, more efficient, and more supported in their critical missions.’
Given the vital and sensitive work of federal agencies, it should be noted that recent studies by OpenAI itself have identified that new ChatGPT models are hallucinating more than previous models, with GPT 03 hallucinated 33% of the time during the firm’s PersonaQA benchmark, a test involving questions about public figures.
Worryingly, this figure rose to 51% in the SimpleQA benchmark – a general knowledge based test, and the 04-mini (a smaller new model) performed even worse, with a 79% hallucination rate.
OpenAI have assured that research is ongoing regarding AI hallucinations, and that there’s a consistent effort to address the reliability of models. Hallucinations are tracked by the company, and there are guides available for developers to help improve the model’s accuracy.
Artificial intelligence is permeating through all different industries, with wide scale adoption across both professional and personal environments.
AI companies, like ChatGPT’s OpenAI, have significant influence in the US administration, and are leveraging this influence to presumably create a dependency, or at least a level of reliance, within government agencies.
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