This Kenyan-made ChatGPT tool answers your questions about the 2024 Finance Bill

 A Kenyan has created a tool based on the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to help Kenyans understand the contentious Finance Bill 2024.

Dubbed ‘Finance Bill GPT’, the chatbot was created by Kelvin Onkundi and works similarly to how OpenAI’s ChatGPT operates; taking questions and generating text-based responses.

Onkundi, who describes himself online as a software engineer, on Thursday announced the chatbot on X.

“If you want to further understand the Finance Bill and its implications, I have created the Finance Bill GPT, a GPT with up-to-date info on the Finance Bill, use it to understand the bill and ask any questions you may have,” he said.

If you want to further understand the finance bill and its implications, i have created the Finance Bill GPT, a GPT with upto date info on the finance bill, use it to understand the bill and ask any questions you may have.https://t.co/PCLCg72ZhP

Several tests by Citizen Digital found that the chatbot nonetheless manages to answer other questions outside the draft law, because of the capabilities of the large language models (LLMs) ChatGPT is based on.

ChatGPT is built on OpenAI's generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models and is refined for conversational applications.

The virtual assistant was released by the Microsoft-backed AI company in November 2022 to massive success and has been credited with stimulating the AI boom.

Creating AI models involves training them by exposing them to large amounts of text data such as books, articles, or web pages.

Asked what materials he used to train ‘Finance Bill GPT’, Onkundi told a social media user “The bill itself and some articles from journalists.” He was, however, not immediately available for a Citizen Digital request for comment.

Post 2021 with OpenAI’s release of GPT-3, its third large language model, Chatbot applications have seen a spike with the increase in large language models.

This has led to the birth of AI tools that can generate almost real-looking images, speech synthesisers and, recently, text-to-video models.

Currently, there are plenty of LLMs such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Llama 3 by Facebook parent Meta.

OpenAI's most recent GPT foundation model, GPT-4, was released on March 14, 2023, and the company’s text-to-video generation model, Sora, is under development.

The unpopular 2024 Finance Bill is sponsored by Molo MP Kimani Kuria and it seeks to amend various legislations such as the Income Tax Act, the Value Added Tax Act, the Excise Duty Act, the Tax Procedures Act and the Miscellaneous Fees and Levies Act.

Others are the Affordable Housing Act, the Industrial Training Act, the Data Protection Act, the Public Finance Management Act, and the Kenya Revenue Authority Act.

During the draft law’s public participation process which closed on June 10, over 600 stakeholders appeared before the National Assembly Finance Committee – which the bill’s sponsor Kuria chairs – to present their views.

Treasury seeks to raise Ksh.300 billion more through taxes in the bill, even though opinion polls show a large majority of Kenyans oppose it.

Parliament is considering the draft law this week.