Vectara Announces AskNews: A GenAI Application for Answering Questions About the News, Powered by Vectara

Search recent news events using Vectara’s Grounded Generation, which returns a summarized answer to your question with citations to facts from the top 5 sources

Vectara, the Generative AI (GenAI) conversational search platform, announces AskNews – a GenAI application for answering questions about the news, powered by Vectara’s Grounded Generation platform and built using Vectara’s open source tools vectara-ingest and vectara-answer.

As GenAI applications continue to become more mainstream, one of the biggest challenges facing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT is hallucinations, and in particular, when it comes to being up-to-date on recent news. AskNews is a powerful demonstration of Vectara’s Grounded Generation approach to building GenAI applications that are based on recent data and thus all but eliminates hallucinations.

“ChatGPT is trained on a dataset that has information ending on September 2021, so if someone asks ChatGPT ‘who owns Silicon Valley Bank’ it gives the wrong answer since it is not aware of the recent collapse of SVB,” said Ofer Mendelevitch, Head of Developer Relations at Vectara. “With AskNews, the response is based on recent news from five different news sources: CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News and CNBC. Using relevant news articles about Silicon Valley Bank allows AskNews to provide a response that is accurate and based on the right facts.”

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Hallucinations in large language models continue to be an area of concern for many enterprises that apply GenAI to applications like AI-based customer service bots, workplace search, customer-facing productivity tools, or other research tools within their business.

As companies that build foundation models often train their models on user data, data privacy is a key concern for business customers to avoid data leaks as a result of using these LLMs within their organization.

“The privacy of your data is of utmost importance to us, and customer data is never used to train models, “ said Dr. Amr Awadallah, Co-founder and CEO of Vectara. “The AskNews sample app demonstrates this – we do not train on the news articles; instead, our zero-shot Grounded Generation algorithms extract the most important facts from these articles and use that to provide accurate summarized answers.”, he added.

AskNews exemplifies how GenAI applications powered by Vectara can overcome the two main issues that remain a top concern for businesses: hallucinations and data privacy.

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