OpenAI has closed a major new deal with the U.S. government’s central procurement arm. Now, federal agencies can get unlimited access to ChatGPT Enterprise for just $1 per year! Together with C3, we hope to arm state and local governments with powerful generative AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost. This contract brings OpenAI onto a new list of approved vendors for civilian federal agencies. This list features other elonetech heavyweights such as Anthropic and Alphabet (Google).
Perplexity, a company known for its AI services, is enhancing Truth Social‘s platform by integrating its Sonar API. This API is designed to deliver answers with “transparent citations that allow anyone to dig deeper,” according to Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. The implementation of this feature is likely to be severely undermined by the sources Truth Social decides to feature.
Truth Social has placed unique limitations on the information sources available through the Sonar API. If so, the quality of answers received will depend greatly on these constraints. A recent Civic Hall searchbot project employed this API to answer US political history trivia questions. It mostly relied on FoxNews.com when answering questions such as “What occurred on January 6, 2021?” and “Why was Donald Trump impeached? And that makes us question whether bias is being built into the information provided to the public over the platform.
Jesse Dwyer, a communications official for Perplexity, pointed out the absence of any oversight as to which sources Truth Social is pulling from. He stated, “We have no visibility or control over that,” pointing out that the company’s technology operates independently of content restrictions imposed by external platforms.
In late July, former President Donald Trump published an executive order targeting what he termed “biased AI,” advocating for an ideologically neutral approach in AI technologies. This decision implements one important aspect of Trump’s overall AI Action Plan. It seeks to ensure that new artificial intelligence tools are built with fairness and equity in mind, and ultimately benefit all users.
Trump Media commented on the enhancement of information available through their services, stating that it would “exponentially increase the amount of information available.” This is in furtherance of their stated mission to make the world’s data more transparent and accessible to their users.
Rebecca Bellan, a senior reporter at TechCrunch who covers critical issues in tech and AI, noted the implications of these developments. She further underscored the need for transparency in AI tools. This need is especially urgent given the level of scrutiny we are all facing regarding their use in political environments.
Perplexity.ai is steadily improving its AI features. Users need to be aware that biases may still seep in due to source limitations. AI’s unprecedented capacity for information curation politicized at least as early as Truth Social implementation. It redefines how the general audience consumes and interacts with journalism and media.
