The Financial Times (FT) has unveiled ‘Ask FT’, a new AI-powered chatbot tailored for its subscribers. This innovative chatbot, leveraging decades of the newspaper’s archives, aims to provide accurate and articulate responses to users’ inquiries, distinguishing itself from general AI bots by drawing exclusively from FT’s rich repository of content.
Tailoring Information Access
Diving deeper into its unique features, ‘Ask FT’ distinguishes itself by offering insights grounded in the outlet’s own articles, allowing for a highly reliable and specific source of information. For instance, it adeptly addresses questions about the leadership within Microsoft’s AI division, showcasing its ability to provide current and detailed answers, such as the recent appointment of DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, while directly citing relevant FT articles.
Despite its potential, ‘Ask FT’ is not without its challenges, encountering occasional inaccuracies, like mistakenly identifying Nikki Haley as a 2024 US presidential race candidate post-withdrawal. Nevertheless, the chatbot’s capacity to deliver insights across a broad spectrum of topics, from breaking news to deep dives into the FT’s historical content, underscores its significant value.
What Powers ‘Ask FT’?
‘Ask FT’ operates on Claude, a sophisticated language model by Anthropic, demonstrating the FT’s commitment to utilizing the best technology available, irrespective of the provider. This approach underlines the outlet’s strategic initiative to enhance digital interaction with its audience, offering this service to a select segment of its Professional tier subscribers at present.
The FT’s venture into AI with ‘Ask FT’ is part of its broader strategy to remain at the forefront of digital innovation. By actively soliciting and incorporating subscriber feedback, the FT aims to refine the chatbot’s performance continuously, aspiring to redefine the standards of digital engagement between news platforms and their audiences. With ‘Ask FT’ still in its beta phase, its promising trajectory hints at a transformative future for digital news consumption.
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Featured Image courtesy of Financial Times