The Financial Times has launched a new artificial intelligence chatbot, called Ask Ft. Its goal is to answer questions on topics covered by the site.
Like competing initiatives, from ChatGpt to Copilot and Gemini, just ask the chatbot what you want in natural language and it will take information from the Financial Times as inspiration to formulate the answers.
The model behind Ask Ft is Claude, developed by the startup Anthropic, main rival of Open AI and ChatGpt.
It is available to a few hundred Ft Professional subscribers, aimed at business professionals and institutions.
In an interview with the specialized site The Verge, Lindsey Jayne, Chief Product Officer of the Financial Times, said that the publisher could soon make the chatbot available to more users, but only after further testing and verification.
“We carried out a series of internal experiments to refine the model,” explains Jayne.
“In this first limited release we are monitoring every question and answer, as well as user feedback.”
Given the particular field of interest of Ask Ft, hyperlinks are inserted at the end of each sentence produced by the AI which represent the source of information used to respond.
Microsoft's Copilot does the same thing, indicating the websites it relied on to generate sentences.
The main difference is that Ask Ft refers only to articles from the Financial Times, while Copilot refers to the wider knowledge of the network.
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