Employees of the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate and certain IT efforts, have been given a custom chatbot from Elon Musk's DOGE to help automate tasks, according to a new report from Wired, with an internal memo telling workers it can be used to "draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code." The chatbot, GSAi, gives users a choice of three models -- Claude Haiku 3.5 (the default), Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta Llama 3.2 -- and is ultimately meant to be used to "analyze contract and procurement data," Wired reports. The GSA is one of the many agencies that have been affected by the federal government's mass job cuts, and has so far let go upwards of 1,000 workers, sources told NPR in a report published this week. That includes roughly 90 people from its tech branch, according to Wired. In memos about the new chatbot seen by Wired, workers were told not to input "federal nonpublic information," personally identifiable information or "controlled unclassified information."

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is pushing to rapidly develop "GSAi," a custom generative AI chatbot for the US General Services Administration, according to two people familiar with the project. The plan is part of President Donald Trump's AI-first agenda to modernize the federal government with advanced technology. One goal of the initiative, which hasn't been previously reported, is to boost the day-to-day productivity of the GSA's roughly 12,000 employees, who are tasked with managing office buildings, contracts, and IT infrastructure across the federal government, according to the two people. Musk's team also seemingly hopes to use the chatbot and other AI tools to analyze huge swaths of contract and procurement data, one of them says. Both people were granted anonymity because they aren't authorized to speak publicly about the agency's operations.

Get ready to share your custom chatbot with the whole world. OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, after it delayed the project following the chaos of CEO Sam Altman's firing and reinstatement late in 2023. Similar to OpenAI's GPT-4 model and web browsing capabilities, only those who pay 20 a month for ChatGPT Plus can create and use "GPTs." The GPT acronym in ChatGPT actually stands for "generative pretrained transformers," but in this context, the company is using GPT as a term that refers to a unique version of ChatGPT with additional parameters and a little extra training data. Here's how to make your GPT public and some advice to help you get started with the GPT Store.

You don't need to know how to code to create your own AI chatbot. Since the start of November--shortly before the chaos at the company unfolded--OpenAI has let anyone build and publish their own custom versions of ChatGPT, known as "GPTs". Thousands have been created: A "nomad" GPT gives advice about working and living remotely, another claims to search 200 million academic papers to answer your questions, and yet another will turn you into a Pixar character. However, these custom GPTs can also be forced into leaking their secrets. Security researchers and technologists probing the custom chatbots have made them spill the initial instructions they were given when they were created, and have also discovered and downloaded the files used to customize the chatbots.

Rasa is an open source machine learning framework for automated text and voice-based conversations. Understand messages, hold conversations, and connect to messaging channels and APIs. The basic pre-requisite here is Anaconda. It helps to handle packages and keep different code dependencies from meddling with each other. If you use pip install rasa[full] it will install all dependencies (spaCy and MITIE) of Rasa for every configuration making your life easier.