No, they are right. This is basically just GOV.uk for America, and GOV.uk by all accounts is an incredible success.

What are the innumerable cruel and harmful things that Google has done to society?

What is cruel and harmful about America.gov? Or do you just not like the current president ?

One must consider the possibility that the goal is unattainable without the harm.

A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.

It's great that you recognize that as your opinion.

I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.

Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.

Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.

I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.

> but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance

You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.

I don't know for the gov. For HR, the best approach I've seen is to have source and links extremely prominent and have the bot speak like a mascot ("bip bip boop I'm the HR bot" style)

People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.

> how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?

Compare this with the benchmark.

Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.

Painfully this will fall to the court decide and create the precedence here. If this is an official government app, then the onus probably is on the government to provide correct information? Who knows, it could go either way and the courts could say "you're on the hook".

I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.

If the catholic church can do it (magisterium), it can probably be done

>it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.

The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.

https://www.usds.gov/

Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.

Was OpenAI available at that time? No, bad comparison bot.

I believe it's a mix of Gemini and Grok. They are probably providing the compute for free.

Please do share what you find. It sounds great and if it really is, people should know that (regardless of what color they bleed)

Do you not think we can take that at face value?

Why not?

>google's secret sauce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

Take it from me, this'll be all the rage next year.

"Save token spend by optimizing your agents' grepping spree!"

> they definitely have some internal tech that competitors don't.

So this is why Google is considered so far ahead of its competitors in the AI race!! (lol)

It’s wrong

must just trigger on touch

IE6 had real American values :-)

And many of them argue that Ai is just like the horse and buggy driver to the taxi driver for jobs.

Yet in fact using America.gov, shows BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data showing a sharp drop in projected software developer job growth compared to 2016. Back then, the BLS projected 31% growth over a decade—accurately predicting that subsequent tech boom. Today, their decade-ahead projection has dropped to just 10%. If they were right about the boom, will they be right about this slowdown to potential bust?

And yet the adminstration pumps up the benefits of Ai surrounding tech job growth where there own statistical projection says otherwise and that's only their data set around software developers not other white collar jobs.

Honestly if your city has a 311 style thing, I'm not sure there's a ton of need for an LLM. Eight or nine years ago my grandmother visited me in New York and accidentally left her pocket book in the cab. Since I had paid for it with my credit card, I was able to see the medallion number in the transaction, so I called 311 and said that I wanted to get in touch with a specific taxi. It prompted me for the medallion number, which I told it, and then it transferred me to a call with the dispatch service, who then transferred me to the specific garage, and they called the driver and told him to call me, so we were able to meet up again and get the pocketbook back (turned out he returned to where he had dropped us off to try to find us, but since we only had a short stop there, we took another cab back to her hotel after, so we were gone).

I'm trying to do something similar but more general, pulling in city pdfs but also meeting transcripts, budget data, municipal codes and permit data, and providing all this through an mcp. I've used it a number of times for personal interactions with my local government, it's been very helpful.

I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.

https://civicmined.org

This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.

Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.

Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.

The thought is nice but in reality you're basically asking the government to give up power and it takes obscene amounts of political capital to force that to happen in most cases.

GOPHER lives!

The web would be a better place if everything were more GOPHER-like.

no, static documents are not an ideal way to find a needle in a haystack