Sceptics wonder whether ‘Diella’, depicted as a woman in traditional folk costume, will herself be ‘corrupted’.

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has put an artificial intelligence-generated “minister” in charge of tackling corruption in his new cabinet.

Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, was appointed on Thursday, with the leader introducing her as a “member of the cabinet who is not present physically” who will ensure that “public tenders will be 100 percent free of corruption”.

The awarding of tenders has long been a source of corruption in the Balkan country of 2.8 million people, which aspires to join the European Union.

Corruption is a key factor in Albania’s bid to join the bloc.

Rama’s Socialist Party, which recently secured a fourth term in office, has said it can deliver EU membership for Albania in five years, with negotiations concluding by 2027.

Lawmakers will soon vote on Rama’s new cabinet, but it was unclear whether he would ask for a vote on Diella’s virtual post.

Legal experts say more work may be needed to establish the official status of Diella, who is depicted on screen as a woman in a traditional Albanian folk costume.

Gazmend Bardhi, parliamentary group leader of the Democrats, said he considered Diella’s ministerial status unconstitutional.

“[The] Prime Minister’s buffoonery cannot be turned into legal acts of the Albanian state,” Bardhi posted on Facebook.

The prime minister did not provide details of what human oversight there might be for Diella, or address risks that someone could manipulate the artificial intelligence bot.

Launched earlier this year as a virtual assistant on the e-Albania public service platform, Diella helped users navigate the site and get access to about one million digital documents.

So far, she has helped issue 36,600 digital documents and provided nearly 1,000 services through the platform, according to official figures.

Not everyone is convinced.

One Facebook user said, “Even Diella will be corrupted in Albania.”

Another said, “Stealing will continue and Diella will be blamed.”

OpenAI has reached a new tentative agreement with Microsoft and said its nonprofit, which technically controls its business, will now be given a $100 billion equity stake in its for-profit corporation.

The maker of ChatGPT said it had reached a new nonbinding agreement with Microsoft, its longtime partner, “for the next phase of our partnership.”

The announcements on Thursday include a few details about these new arrangements. OpenAI’s proposed changes to its corporate structure have drawn the scrutiny of regulators, competitors and advocates concerned about the impacts of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and its nonprofit board has continued to control the for-profit subsidiary that now develops and sells its AI products. It’s not clear whether the $100 billion equity stake the nonprofit will get as part of this announcement represents a controlling stake in the business.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said last week that his office was investigating OpenAI’s proposed restructuring of its finances and governance.

He and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings also sent the company a letter expressing concerns about the safety of ChatGPT after meeting with OpenAI’s legal team earlier last week in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated.

“Together, we are particularly concerned with ensuring that the stated safety mission of OpenAI as a non-profit remains front and center,” Bonta said in a statement last week.

Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and the two companies later formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build OpenAI’s technology. In turn, Microsoft heavily used the technology behind ChatGPT to enhance its own AI products.

The two companies announced on Jan. 21 that they were altering that agreement, enabling the smaller company to build its own computing capacity, “primarily for research and training of models.” That coincided with OpenAI’s announcements of a partnership with Oracle to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas.

But other parts of its agreements with Microsoft remained up in the air as the two companies appeared to veer further apart. Their Thursday joint statement said they were still “actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement.” Both companies declined further comment.

OpenAI had given its nonprofit board of directors — whose members now include a former U.S. Treasury secretary — the responsibility of deciding when its AI systems have reached the point at which they “outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” a concept known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Such an achievement, per its earlier agreements, would cut off Microsoft from the rights to commercialize such a system, since the terms “only apply to pre-AGI technology.”

OpenAI’s corporate structure and nonprofit mission are also the subject of a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, who helped found the nonprofit research lab and provided initial funding. Musk’s suit seeks to stop OpenAI from taking control of the company away from its nonprofit and alleges it has betrayed its promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.

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