Ever since Elon Musk started working — advising, consulting or whatever — with the US government, a day hasn’t gone by without him being in the headlines. At the forefront is Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Now, it has sparked yet another controversy by launching a chatbot named GSAi. According to a report by Wired, the chatbot, GSAi, was introduced to the US General Services Administration (GSA), an agency responsible for managing federal real estate and overseeing government contracts.
The report mentions that approximately 1,500 employees now have access to GSAi, which is designed to assist with tasks such as drafting emails, summarising text, creating talking points, and writing code.
However, employees have been cautioned against sharing sensitive or nonpublic information with the chatbot, limiting its utility for more complex tasks, states the report.
The chatbot, GSAi, offers users three models to choose from: Claude Haiku 3.5 (the default), Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2, and Meta Llama 3.2.
Critics argue that GSAi, described by some employees as "about as good as an intern," cannot adequately replace the expertise and experience of the terminated workers. The chatbot's responses have been characterised as generic and predictable, raising doubts about its ability to handle the nuanced and specialised work previously performed by human employees.
Interestingly, GSAi was already in development before Musk's involvement, as part of broader efforts to integrate chatbot technology into federal agencies. However, these projects were reportedly delayed due to functionality issues. Despite this, DOGE expedited the rollout of GSAi amidst the mass layoffs, leading to questions about the decision's timing and rationale.
The layoffs and chatbot deployment have drawn criticism from labour advocates and federal employees, who fear a decline in service quality and efficiency.
The report also mentions that the chatbots were meant to be enablers to the existing government employees and not act as a replacement.
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