Jason Langsner is Group Product Manager, Data + AI, at The Washington Post. In this article he shares how they built The Post's in-house generative AI chatbot tool that uses RAG to answer user questions.
The Washington Post may be best known for our world-class and award-winning reporting, but we also pride ourselves on being industry leaders in technology and innovation. In addition to producing journalism, we also develop products and solutions in house to improve our users’ experience, including through our expanding AI Pod Research & Development (R&D) lab and newly launched WP Incubator.
One such product is “Ask The Post AI,” The Post’s in-house generative AI chatbot tool that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to answer user questions grounded in our journalism:
As AI tools matured fast, in 2022, we hosted an AI hackathon, in which we took the collective energies and ingenuity of our engineering and product teams — in partnership with our newsroom — across five days to rethink how we leverage AI and machine learning tools for media. That hackathon was a major success, leading to the creation of the AI Pod R&D lab and pointing us towards several exciting new experiments.
One of those experiments evolved into Ask The Post AI, The Post’s way of connecting readers to a library of our reporting. To test this feature, we started with focus. Before releasing Ask The Post AI across our entire newsroom, we released Climate Answers in partnership with The Post’s Climate Desk. This chatbot pulls from a Large Language Model (LLM) that answers readers’ questions based entirely on The Post’s extensive climate and environmental coverage. This was a success, but only a first step.
We scaled Climate Answers with the help of Meta’s open-source Llama LLM models to create Ask The Post AI. The tool takes questions from readers and collects relevant information from across our reporting library to answer them. In other words, rather than stringing together bits of information yourself from a variety of Post articles, Ask The Post AI does it for you. This is an alternative approach to needing to use Post search to find those articles and then get to an answer, the tool provides an answer with citations to the original journalism.
Ask The Post AI’s answers are as trustworthy as our award-winning journalism
You will find no random sources or unwarranted assumptions, as you might with other LLMs. Each answer is based only on a library of Post reporting from the last eight years. Feed Ask The Post AI a question — like “Will tariffs impact me?” — and you’ll get an answer back in seconds, based only on credibly sourced, fact-based journalism.
Of course, like many of our developing products, this is a work in progress — and like all LLMs, Ask The Post AI is improving through time and iterations. For transparency, each answer from Ask The Post AI is accompanied by links to the articles that served as sources, and we encourage readers to further verify responses by checking those articles.
Ask The Post AI continues to evolve and improve with every question our readers ask. User research and feedback allows us to improve and tailor how it responds. For instance, we work hard to establish when the LLM should make clear to readers that there isn’t sufficient Post coverage to offer a solid answer. Additionally, we’re working towards where and how Ask The Post is contextually available — such as recent experimentation to add the tool on some articles. And as we iterate for external needs, the AI Pod R&D lab supports internal customers — leaning into our own tooling as creators and as staff users before we make features available externally to Post subscribers and users.
Although Ask The Post AI is our main reader-oriented AI tool, it is only one of several that our team is working on — and the team is getting bigger. The Post just named its first Chief AI Officer, Sam Han, who will guide us to innovate and expand within a strict ethical and journalistic framework. Sam will also support WP Incubator, modeled after successful incubators in Silicon Valley in design to develop cutting-edge products. .
Try Ask The Post AI to interact with the news or head to washingtonpost.com to play our games, listen to our podcasts, watch our videos, and — of course — read our award-winning journalism.
