The Netherlands Central Bank’s ChatDNB

Centralbanking.com recently gave its annual central banking awards for 2024.

One award caught my eye. The initiative of the year award has been given to Netherlands central bank for developing applications using artificial intelligence. They have built their own ChatDNB:

When OpenAI, the US-based artificial intelligence research firm, launched ChatGPT in late November 2022, technology experts at the Netherlands Bank (DNB) were immediately intrigued by the potential opportunities the technology could offer the central bank. In the next few months, they actively engaged in knowledge sessions with universities to better understand the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). They soon came up with the idea to partner with Microsoft, the tech firm backing OpenAI, to develop a GenAI application tailored to the central bank’s needs. 

Starting in April 2023, a group of data scientists, software engineers, large language model specialists and regulatory experts at the central bank worked around the clock to design ChatDNB, with the support of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. In May, the team had already built a proof of concept, trained with five publicly available annual reports used as textual source material. This proof of concept showcased the potential of the tool and sparked interest from supervisors.

Building on their initial success, the group then focused on developing a pilot product. They set about creating a prototype chatbot leveraging more than 10,000 pages of data from the central bank’s Open Book Supervision, a database of laws, regulations and a wide range of supervisory information. The chatbot was able to answer questions based on the information stored in the pages. A pilot with this dataset resulted in positive feedback from supervisors and policy-makers. This, combined with keen interest from supervised institutions in the project, encouraged the team to further develop their product within the central bank.

Trust central banks to have their own ChatFed, ChatRBI etc in future.