Albania will be the first country in the world to have one Minister entirely created with artificial intelligence: his name is Diella, who in Albanian means “sun”, and will deal with public contracts, one of the sectors with the highest index of corruption in the country. The news was announced directly by the Albanian Prime Minister Rama Ediduring an assembly of the Socialist Party in Tirana in which all the ministers of his fourth government mandate were presented.
Diella, in reality, already operated as virtual assistant on the platform e-albaniacreated to provide support to citizens in accessing public services and was created by the National Agency for the information society through Microsoft technologies such as Azure Openai. Rama, however, specified that the transition will still be gradual and initially managed by the ministries in charge: the final goal is to make the public tenders “100%incorruptible”, speeding up the time of bureaucracy.
As Diella was created, the first minister Ai in the world
In reality, the figure of Diella is not new to the Albanian people. Since January 2024, Diella, dressed in traditional Albanian costumes, has been working as Virtual assistant on the E-Albania state platformwhich provides users to manage digital bureaucracy and allows access to approximately 95% of public services.
Diella, in particular, was developed by the Albanian National Agency for the information society through the use of advanced technologies of Microsoftincluding Azure Openii and the most recent artificial intelligence models. The first prototype, Diella 1.0was trained by collecting beyond a million questions and answers provided by users, Used as linguistic data to train Diella so as to contribute to the improvement of her performance. During the following year, then, the agency presented the version 2.0with expanded features and greater response capacity, marking a new phase in the development of the project.
Not surprisingly, last March, the Albanian Prime Minister had already announced that he was at work, together with Microsoft, to “create an artificial intelligence model that can do everything and that should be ready by the end of 2026”, anticipating that E-Albania would go to a subsequent level for the functions performed.
What will be the functions of the Minister Ai Diella
The Prime Minister Edi Rama specified that the transition process from the ministries to Diella will still be gradual: the responsibilities of establishing the winners of the public tenders will be gradually entrusted artificial intelligence and at first it will still depend on the decisions of natural persons, so as to ensure that “all public spending in the contract process is 100% transparent“. The final goal, in short, is to limit the possibilities of corruption: according to the Corruption Perceptions Index, In 2024 Albania is perceived as one of the most corrupt European countries, with a score of 42 out of 100 and a global position of 80 out of a total of 180 states considered.
Diella will also take care of evaluating the offers and will have the right to “take talents from all over the world“To break down” the fear of prejudices and the rigidity of the administration “, according to what confirmed by Rama during the assembly. Specifically, the minister Ai will examine each tender through which the government enters contracts with private companies, evaluating the merits of each without the risk of corruption, threats or conflicts of interest.
Several citizens, however, have raised critical issues regarding this choice of the government: the Minister Ai, in fact, could be the subject of Hacker attacksthe model training process could be modified with the aim of filling public contracts or, simply, artificial intelligence may be wrong.
