An AI chatbot built by one person as a proof-of-concept on a Friday afternoon, with no guarantee it’ll get off the ground. Has a government project ever sounded so much like a startup?
That’s what I was thinking listening to Canadian Digital Service’s Michael Karlin at the Ottawa Responsible AI Summit this week. His team is prototyping a GPT-4-powered tool that is supposed to make searching any of the federal government’s 10-million-plus webpages much easier. But why use OpenAI’s model when the government has an agreement with Canadian firm Cohere?
On stage, Karlin discussed the security and equity considerations of building a public-facing government AI tool. Afterwards, he took me under the hood.
Cohere’s models use a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, while Karlin’s web navigation tool uses an agent-based approach. Karlin explained that using RAG is “really difficult” on a website that’s as large, and changes as often, as the Canadian government’s.
“[We’d] require a number of people to constantly curate the data,” Karlin said. “What we’ve done instead is build agents to sniff out new websites, or updates to websites.”
That’s not to say Cohere can’t fit somewhere in that pipeline, Karlin added, but “those decisions haven’t been made yet.” Much like a startup, it looks like Karlin’s team will be iterating as they go.
Alex Riehl
Staff Writer, Ottawa
Uber Canada is working with MADD Canada (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) in the fight against impaired driving.
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Feature image courtesy Ottawa Responsible AI Summit.