The western German state of Baden-Württemberg will be the first in Germany to use an AI system to alleviate the burden on staff and ease citizens’ access to administrative services, the organization behind the initiative announced on Thursday.
The system, F13, was developed primarily by the Heidelberg-based AI start-up Aleph Alpha, which has been touted as a German response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though aimed at government, administration and industry in particular.
F13 is to be made available for use by other public administrations in Germany from September, GovTech Campus Deutschland said. The organization is a public/private partnership to produce and advance innovative technologies in the public sector.
Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister Thomas Strobl said that with F13, documents could be analysed more quickly, applications processed automatically and complex data evaluated efficiently.
He said it was important that the AI technologies being used adhere to ethical principles. “We are not relying on China or America; instead, we are finding our own European way,” he said.
Data protection
The service will be operated on computers in Germany, ensuring that sensitive data is not sent overseas but processed domestically. The hosting service provider is the company STACKIT, which belongs to the Schwarz Group – the owner of retail giants Lidl and Kaufland.
Last November, the Schwarz Group, together with the Bosch Group and venture capital firm Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI), announced an investment of €500 million ($542 million) in Aleph Alpha.
Jonas Andrulis, chief executive of Aleph Alpha, said F13 fulfilled the promise of sovereign AI.
“Citizens can rely on compliance with the highest data protection standards and public sector experts nationwide can count on comprehensible results,” Andrulis said. This would “allow more time for people’s concerns.”
Data protection concerns are particularly acute in Germany, largely due to the once divided country’s history of state surveillance.
F13 was initially trained with publicly accessible data such as state legislative documents and press releases. In future, however, the system is also to learn from internal administration documents.
Wake-up call
Florian Stegmann, the head of the Baden-Württemberg state chancellery, said the system offered a tangible benefit to state administrators.
“F13 was a wake-up call. After the hype surrounding the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI, we have shown that AI technology can be adapted for the administration,” Stegmann said.
Initial enthusiasm around Aleph Alpha had cooled significantly, partly due to the revelation that the company had only achieved a turnover of just under €1 million ($1.08 million) last year.