The Government's New AI Front Door Runs on Google's Gemini and Musk's Grok. Its First Answers Contradicted the President, and Before He Finished Speaking It Stopped Taking 'Political Questions'
About This Episode
President Trump signed an executive order on September 29 launching America.gov, a chatbot built by the White House's National Design Studio that answers plain-language questions from 29,000 government websites and gives every agency 90 days to plug in. Joe Gebbia says it runs on Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. On launch day the bot told AP, CNN and the New York Times that Biden won the 2020 election, that prices have not fallen and that two earlier presidents declined a salary, then began refusing 'political questions' while Trump was still on stage.
Our Take
The federal government just put two private AI models between 40 million daily users and the official record, and on day one it showed that whoever holds the dial can change what the machine says without anyone seeing the dial turn.
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The bot's answers were changed within minutes with no public record of what was changed or by whom, which is exactly the 'no decision in the dark' gap the Truth Must Be Seen axiom describes for any system that speaks for government.
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