The newly appointed government minister for AI has not yet utilized ChatGPT.

      Ireland's newly appointed minister for AI oversight has acknowledged that she has never used ChatGPT and has not yet downloaded the trending chatbot DeepSeek to her phone, as reported by the Irish Independent on Tuesday. Niamh Smyth has taken on the role of junior minister at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, where her responsibilities include trade promotion, AI, and digital transformation.

      Regarding this transformative technology, Smyth mentioned that it presents "a new learning curve," but she is committed to learning quickly and fully engaging with her new position. She expressed confidence in her knowledge, stating that she understands "as much as any colleague" due to her involvement in recent briefings on the topic.

      Smyth expressed immediate concerns about high school students potentially using AI technology for their homework, while also emphasizing the need to support businesses and educate them about the advantages of artificial intelligence to create efficiencies and clarify its use.

      This situation recalls an unusual incident in 2018 when Japan appointed a cyber-security minister who later revealed he had never used a computer. Yoshitaka Sakurada, then 68 years old, stated, "Since I was 25 years old and independent, I instructed my staff and secretaries — I have never used a computer in my life," as reported by the Kyodo news agency. He faced criticism during a parliamentary session for appearing confused by basic technology-related inquiries. An opposition lawmaker expressed disbelief that someone responsible for cybersecurity had no experience with computers. Sakurada ultimately resigned about six months later, though his departure was unrelated to his lack of computer experience.

      Not long ago, Trevor moved from one tea-drinking island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)...

      Shortly after assuming office, Donald Trump promoted a new private business venture led by OpenAI, which intends to invest half a trillion dollars over the next four years to establish the data centers and power production facilities necessary for the expanding AI industry in the U.S. "It’s big money and high-quality people," Trump remarked during a January 21st press announcement with Sam Altman from OpenAI, Larry Ellison from Oracle, and Masayoshi Son from SoftBank. He described the project as "a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential" under his administration, despite the federal government having no involvement in the initiative.

      The AI sector is buzzing about a new large language model that is challenging top players like OpenAI and Anthropic. This model, called DeepSeek, originates from China and is open source. Notably, it is said to have been developed at a fraction of the cost compared to investments made by current industry leaders such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

      In a recent post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reacted to DeepSeek's rapid success by promising to unveil some new releases, which he has done. OpenAI introduced its latest product, ChatGPT Gov, described as a "tailored version of ChatGPT designed to provide U.S. government agencies with an additional means to access OpenAI’s frontier models." This platform reportedly offers enhanced data security measures compared to ChatGPT Enterprise, but questions remain about how it will address the hallucinations that affect other models from the company.

      As per OpenAI, over 90,000 federal, state, and local government employees from 3,500 agencies have accessed ChatGPT more than 18 million times since the beginning of 2024. The new platform will allow government agencies to input "non-public, sensitive information" into ChatGPT while operating within their secure hosting environments—specifically, the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government community cloud—and following cybersecurity frameworks like IL5 or CJIS. Felipe Millon, Government Sales lead at OpenAI, informed reporters that this setup allows each agency to "manage their own security, privacy, and compliance requirements.”