AI and Government

The Way of Business is Changing

I am a big believer that this wave of AI innovation is fundamentally changing the way businesses, governments and citizens live, work and play. ChatGPT, according to sources, has (at the time of publishing) around 180.5 million monthly active users. When the latest model, GPT-4o, was announced - traffic spiked to over 100 million visitors DAILY. What was reserved for specialized academics and huge corporations just a few years ago is now in the hands of anyone with an internet connected device. It almost feels like the popular "just google it", is being replaced by "what did ChatGPT say?"

Harnessing the ever-growing power of AI

Through this boom, so many other companies have been born eager to solve those burning issues that keep us up at night. Groq is building new hardware that is eviscerating the time it takes to run inference with these Large Language Models (editor's note: Fordje is powered by Groq's inference platform). HuggingFace, LangChain and so many others are building and hosting tools that enable the masses to quickly get up and running with projects that are harnessing the ever-growing power of AI.

It feels like a new age of Internet is upon us, and it is very exciting. With that excitement, it is important to take a step back and remember - computers are not magic! Computers are, by and large, processors that move 1s and 0s around. AI is not a fantasy cure-all that can be sprinkled onto a keyboard and magically solve all of the worlds problems. AI is often NOT the right answer. It is important for the broader community to remember what we've been told so often - use the right tool, not the shiny tool.

Data relevance and responses

What is the right use-case for AI? There are so many articles already written on this subject, that I won't bore you with rehashing them here. In my mind, it really boils down to taking huge volumes of data and simplifying it for clear communication. Think about how the human brain works - we start learning as soon as we are born; we go to school and amass a large volume of information; we interact with our peers and community and store how to interact and communicate with others. Now, every time we start a new interaction we recall (some of) what we have previously learned, apply it to the context of the current conversation, and generate a response.

AI works in a very similar way, barring the fact it has access to a seemingly limitless source of input knowledge. At it's core, AI is retrieving information relevant to the current conversation, ranking the information based on likelihood of accuracy, and synthesizing a response. It is not perfect, but it is improving daily.

Bringing Government and Citizens together

How does this impact the government? Every day the government is working for it's citizens in a multitude of ways. There are meeting minutes being created, there are bills being considered for law, there is research being conducted focused on the environment, defense, monetary policy, weather, you name it. So much information is being collected, stored and communicated - it is impossible for anyone to keep up.

The power of AI is bringing simplicity and understanding to large volumes of information. The government works for the benefit of it's citizens and, through AI, it's citizens are better informed and collaborative. It is not magic, but it is a great step forward.