The Digital Government Committee is planning to make a Khmer language version of popular artificial intelligence (AI) technology ChatGPT available to the public in the near future, following extensive testing.

On March 9, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications revealed that it has been using the technology to ease its daily workload for the past six months.

The ministry said the digital committee has been analysing the system in depth, and held discussions with its designers about Khmer language specific details.

“ChatGPT is an AI system that was developed in 2018 by Open AI in San Francisco in the US state of California. It was formally launched last year. GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT). It is a language model that uses AI algorithms and is designed to understand and create human-like language,” it added.

The ministry explained that ChatGPT has the ability to handle day-to-day tasks such as administrative work, human resource management, answering questions, writing articles, translating, and even coding – much like a virtual personal assistant.

“ChatGPT uses a large language model with more than 175 billion scales. It has been developed to be able to understand human language and respond as quickly as a person would. Not only that, it can learn from previous chats, so it can determine different contexts for each person it interacts with,” it added.

“We have trained the programme to interact in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” said the manufacturers.

It said the release of ChatGPT is the latest step in Open AI’s iterative deployment of increasingly safe and useful AI systems.