The Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, has released a chatbot based on Musk's Grok-2 artificial intelligence model, xAI. It is claimed to help civil servants identify and reduce costs. This was reported by TechCrunch.
The chatbot is publicly available and is hosted on a subdomain called DOGE on the website of Christopher Stanley, who is the head of security engineering at SpaceX and also at DOGE.
The chatbot is a specialized large-scale language model trained to meet specific DOGE objectives, including meeting five "guiding principles" that include simplifying government requirements and eliminating "redundant elements or processes".
For example, when asked what DOGE should do with USAID, the chatbot applied the Department's five guiding principles and recommended removing any "bureaucratic layers" between decision makers and USAID recipients.
The chatbot suffers from the same problems as other language models, for example, it can hallucinate. When asked to name the people who work at DOGE, it initially refused, but later named the most common names and fictitious positions. The chatbot also sometimes gives strange advice, such as recommending that USAID use drones, handheld devices, and other internet-connected devices to improve efficiency.
It is also unclear whether the use of xAI's chatbot creates a conflict of interest for Musk. Since large speech models typically charge users for using the API, government officials using the DOGE chatbot could directly increase xAI's revenue.