CivicScience Inc., an East Liberty-based opinion analytics platform that garners four million responses per day on its polling questions placed on news articles and other websites, has launched a new artificial intelligence product for customers that avoids the "hallucinations" that tend to emerge from results produced by large language models, like those behind ChatGPT and Google Bard.
By using its own dataset of nearly 600,000 poll questions and subsequent five billion responses, CivicScience's Sage AI product is able to return results with attributable and verifiable citations, which can even be downloaded for further inquiry in a spreadsheet format.
Sage AI relies on ChatGPT technology for the understanding and initial processing of questions posed to it by a CivicScience customer but any answers it returns are traceable to CivicScience's database of poll responses that it has obtained over the past decade.
The company said answers Sage AI returns to questions customers ask it are "safe for use in critical business decisions" given the reliance on in-house data that CivicScience collects from American consumers.
CivicScience said Sage AI can answer a question as detailed as one like identifying the luxury car-buying trends among middle-aged women who live in the Northeast region of the country, a question that other large language model-based platforms might return incorrect answers to and present those answers as if it were factual information.
"GenAI will ultimately liberate data-driven companies from the drudgery of processing data and let them focus more on the 'why' behind insights," John Dick, CEO and co-founder of CivicScience, said in a statement. "Sage just takes a lot of the worry out of that by ticking and tying every number back to data that our customers have trusted for years."
Access to Sage AI costs $199 per month when billed annually following a seven-day free trial. CivicScience is targeting the product to those who want the "next generation" of consumer insights, which is being partly fueled by the more than 500,000 Americans who complete four CivicScience polls every day.
CivicScience partnered with ChatGPT maker OpenAI Inc. in April 2023 to auto-generate poll questions for readers and is the latest of several Pittsburgh-area companies to announce AI-related product developments built on in-house data.
In October 2023, Gecko Robotics Inc. unveiled its Cantilever product that allows its customers to have easier access to the information that's obtained by Gecko's infrastructure-scaling robots. Cantilever presents these customers with options on how to best prioritize repairs across a set of assets given the information it compiles from these robotic scans.
And in May 2023, Duolingo CEO and Co-Founder Luis von Ahn said on a company earnings call that the language learning platform is using AI to create educational content at a faster and cheaper pace than before. That's saving time across the company's roughly 600-person workforce and it's leading to a better product for its users, von Ahn said.
