Financial Times tests an AI chatbot trained on decades of its own articles.

Source: The Verge

-Subscribers can use Ask FT to answer questions about recent events or broader topics covered by the Financial Times.

By Emma Roth and Quentyn Kennemer

The Financial Times has a new generative AI chatbot called Ask FT that can answer its subscribers' questions. Like generalized AI bots (such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini), users can expect a selected natural language response for anything they want to know, but with answers derived from decades of information published by the media outlet rather than sources that are harder to explain or subject to ongoing legal action. So don't expect me to give you an answer on the best recipe for fettucini alfredo. fettucini alfredo.

When we asked, "Who runs Microsoft's artificial intelligence products?" the tool threw out an updated answer and referenced news that emerged this week about Microsoft hiring DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as head of its new AI team: Mustafa Suleyman currently leads Microsoft's consumer-facing AI division and products as head of Microsoft AI, reporting directly to Satya Nadella [1,2,3]. He was hired from Inflection AI to expand Microsoft's focus on developing generative AI for personal consumer use [1,2,3,4,6].

The numbers in brackets correspond to the Financial Times articles from which he drew information, which he lists below the answer. He also provides the time period in which these articles were written. In the case of this question from Microsoft, it says it obtained information from March 1, 2023 through March 20, 2024.

However, we found inconsistencies in some responses. At the time of our testing, the tool included Nikki Haley and Ron Desantis in its response to our question about who is currently running for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, even though they have already dropped out of the race.

It is available to a few hundred paid subscribers at the FT Professional level, which is aimed at institutions and business professionals. Ask FT currently works with Claude, the large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic, but that could change. In an interview with The Verge , FT product manager Lindsey Jayne says the media outlet is "approaching this as 'model independent' and seeing which one best meets our needs."

It can provide answers to questions about current events, such as how much funding Intel received from the U.S. government under the CHIPS Act, as well as broader queries, such as the effect of cryptocurrencies on the environment. The tool then compiles the Financial Times archives and summarizes the relevant information with citations.

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

"We did a lot of internal testing and used that to refine how we instructed the model and how we built the code," Jayne says. "In this first set of 500, we tracked every question and answer, as well as user feedback."

Last year, we tested a similar tool implemented by digital media owned by marketing firm Foundry, including Macworld , PCWorld and Tech Advisor . However, at the time it wasn't as useful as Ask FT is; My colleague Mia Sato found that it provided inaccurate results to simple questions such as when the latest iPod Nano was released.

"I don't think you get to be a 135-year-old institution if you don't constantly evolve and deal with these moments," Jayne says. "But you have to be smart and not just jump on the hype bandwagon...otherwise, people just play with it for the novelty and then go on with their lives."

Most subscribers will not yet be able to test the chatbot. Ask FT will remain in beta for now as the FT continues to test and evaluate it.