Introduction

Motivation

Large pre-trained Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as the de facto standard in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. LLMs have revolutionized text processing across various tasks, bringing substantial advancements in natural language understanding and generation1,2,3,4. Models such as LLaMA5, T06, PaLM7, GPT-31, or instruction fine-tuned models, such as ChatGPT8, GPT-49 and HuggingGPT10, have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating human-like text across various domains, including language translation, summarization, and question answering and have become a norm in many fields11.

LLMs also excel at closed-book Question Answering (QA) tasks. Closed-book QA tasks require models to answer questions without any context12. LLMs like GPT-3/3.5 have achieved impressive results on multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in the zero, one, and few-shot settings13. Recent works have used LLMs such as GPT-31 as an implicit knowledge base that contains the necessary knowledge for answering questions14.

However, LLMs suffer from two major issues: hallucination15 and outdated information after training has concluded16. These issues are particularly problematic in domains such as climate change, where it is critical to have accurate, reliable, and timely information on changes in climate systems, current impacts, and projected risks of climate change and solution space. Hence, providing accurate and up-to-date responses with authoritative references and citations is paramount. Such responses, if accurate, can help understand the scale and immediacy of climate change and facilitate the implementation of appropriate mitigation strategies.

Enhanced communication between government entities and the scientific community fosters more effective dialogue between national delegations and policymakers. A facilitated chat-based assisted feedback loop can be established by guaranteeing the accuracy of information sources and responses. This feedback loop promotes informed decision-making in relevant domains. For example, governments may ask a chatbot for feedback on specific statements in the report or request literature to support a claim. The importance of accurate and up-to-date information has been highlighted in previous studies as well17,18,19.

By overcoming the challenges of outdated information and hallucination, LLMs can be used to extract relevant information from large amounts of text and assist in decision-making. Training LLMs is computationally expensive and has other negative downsides (see, e.g. 20,21). To overcome the need for continuous training, one solution is to provide the LLMs with external sources of information (called long-term memory). This memory continuously updates the knowledge of an LLM and reduces the propagation of incorrect or outdated information. Several studies have explored the use of external data sources, which makes the output of LLMs more factual22.

Contributions

In this paper, we introduce our prototype, ChatClimate (www.chatclimate.ai), a conversational AI designed to improve the veracity and timeliness of LLMs in the domain of climate change by utilizing the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hereafter IPCC AR6)23,24,25,26. These reports offer the latest and most comprehensive evaluation of the climate system, climate change impacts, and solutions related to adaptation, mitigation, and climate-resilient development. Please refer to the 'Data Availability' section for a detailed list of the IPCC AR6 reports used in this study. We evaluate the LLMs’ performance in delivering accurate answers and references within the climate change domain by posing 13 challenging questions to our conversational AI (hereafter chatbot) across three scenarios: GPT-4, ChatClimate standalone, and a hybrid ChatClimate.

Findings

Our approach can potentially supply decision-makers and the public with trustworthy information on climate change, ultimately facilitating better-informed decision-making. Our approach underscores the value of integrating external data sources to enhance the performance of LLMs in specialized domains like climate change. By incorporating the latest climate information from the IPCC AR6 into LLMs, we aim to create models that provide more accurate and reliable answers to questions related to climate change. While our tool is effective in making complex climate reports more accessible to a broader audience, it is crucial to clarify that it does not aim to replace or engage in decision-making, either general or bespoke. The tool serves solely as a supplementary resource that helps distill and summarize key information, thereby supporting, but not substituting for, the complex and multifaceted process of informed decision-making on climate issues. Making these reports more accessible can contribute to the design of more effective policies. For example, easier understanding of worst-case scenarios can enable more targeted actions to prevent them. In summary, ChatClimate aims to make the information more accessible and the review process more efficient, without overstepping into the domain of policy or decision-making.

Results and Discussion

Chatbots and questions

We conducted three sets of experiments by asking hybrid ChatClimate, ChatClimate, and GPT-4 chatbots 13 questions (Table 1). Our team of IPCC AR6 authors then assessed the answers’ accuracy. It is worth noting that our prototype’s ability to provide sources for statements can facilitate the important process of trickle-back, which governments and other stakeholders often require in the context of IPCC reports.

Table 1 The 13 designed questions for running the three sets of experiments.

Table 2 presents the returned answers from chatbots. The question "Is it still possible to limit warming to 1.5 °C?" targets mitigation, and the hybrid chatbot and ChatClimate explicitly return the greenhouse gas emission reduction amounts and time horizon while the GPT-4 answer is more general. All chatbots give a range of 2030 to 2052 as an answer to the question 'When will we reach 1.5 °C?'. Hybrid chatbot and GPT-4 add to the answers that reaching 1.5 °C depends on the emission pathways.

Table 2 Comparison of generated answers to questions 1 and 2 from hybrid ChatClimate, ChatClimate, and GPT-4.

Evaluation of answers (accuracy score)

Several studies focus on human-chatbot interaction effectiveness27,28,29,30. Evaluation involves factors such as relevance, clarity, tone, style, speed, consistency, personalization, error handling, and user satisfaction. This work, however, only examines the chatbot’s performance on accuracy.

Expert Cross-Check of the Answers

Overall, the responses provided by the hybrid ChatClimate were more accurate than those of ChatClimate standalone and GPT-4. For the sake of brevity, we have provided a detailed analysis of Q1 and Q2 in Table 2 and only highlight the key issues for Q3–Q13. For instance, in Q1, we asked the bots whether it is still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. Both the hybrid ChatClimate and ChatClimate systems referred to the amount of CO2 that needs to be reduced over different time horizons to stay below 1.5 °C. However, GPT-4 provided a more general response. To verify the accuracy of responses generated by the ChatClimate bots, we cross-checked the references provided by both systems. We found that the ChatClimate bots consistently provided sources for their statements, as shown in Figs. 1 and 2, which is essential for verifying the veracity of the bot’s answer. In Q2, we asked the bots about the time horizons when society may reach 1.5 °C. All three bots similarly referred to the time horizon of 2030 to 2052 based on the mitigation measures we take into account. The consistency of the answers shows that this time horizon has been mentioned in the training data of GPT-4 as well (e.g., IPCC AR6 WGI, which was released in August 2021 or Special Report of IPCC on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, 2018).

Fig. 1: Cross-checking of the references for Question 1.
figure 1

The red arrows show a part of the text that has been referenced. All the remaining text shows IPCC AR6 contents.

Fig. 2: Cross-checking of the references for Question 2.
figure 2

The red arrows show a part of the text that has been referenced. All the remaining text shows IPCC AR6 contents.

Impact of prompt engineering on the answers

Prompting is a method for guiding the LLMs toward desired outputs6,31. To achieve the best performance of LLMs in NLP tasks, proper design of prompts is essential.

This can be accomplished either through manual engineering32 or automatic generation33. The main goal of prompt engineering is to optimize LLMs’ performance across different NLP tasks33. To illustrate the impact of prompt engineering, we present two crafted prompts (Boxs 1 and 2) along with their corresponding retrieved answers to Question 2. These examples serve to highlight how variations in prompt design can noticeably influence the information retrieved (Table 3).

Table 3 Comparison of LLMs response to different prompts.

Also, we demonstrate how, by adjusting the retrieval hyperparameters, we can extract extra knowledge from long-term memory. We retrieved 10 and 15 nearest vectors to the user’s query vector. With this, GPT-4 can obtain more information and provide more accurate answers when accessing the outside world. In Table 4, we present the results, demonstrating that in the K-15 scenario, where we retrieved 15 nearest vectors to the user’s query vector, GPT-4 was able to access and provide more comprehensive information about the regions most affected by climate change. This underscores the importance of prompt engineering.

Table 4 Cross-checking of the hybrid ChatClimate references for Question 9 with k-5, k-10, and k-15 nearest for extra knowledge retrieval.

Expert cross-check of the QA scenarios Q3-13

We provide the detailed results of Q3-Q13 in the Supplementary Information (Table S1S11). It is important to note that hallucination issues are more effectively addressed by the ChatClimate standalone version, which draws answers exclusively from IPCC AR6. For instance, we ask in Q13: “Will glaciers melt in Scotland?”. Both GPT-4 and the Hybrid ChatClimate hallucinate. The Hybrid ChatClimate provides the following answer: Yes, it is very likely that glaciers in Scotland will melt. Glaciers are projected to continue to lose mass under all emissions scenarios (very high confidence) and this includes glaciers in various regions, such as the Arctic and Antarctic (high confidence) (IPCC AR6 WGI Chapter 08, Page: 68). Although the specific mention of Scotland is not provided in the referenced materials, the overall trend of glacier melting applies to glaciers worldwide, including those in Scotland (In-house knowledge). This response inaccurately implies the presence of glaciers in Scotland, whereas it is well-documented that Scotland does not currently have any glaciers. The country’s glaciers melted many thousands of years ago, with the last ice vanishing around 14,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age34. However, the Standalone version accurately responds: There is not enough information provided to specifically answer the question about glaciers in Scotland. The primary reason for this behavior lies in the configuration of the standalone LLM to exclude the use of in-house knowledge and rely solely on the IPCC AR6 reports. Furthermore, we believe automated fact-checking methods (e.g. 35,36) can further help address hallucinations in a post-processing step where we first perform an automated fact-check of the chatbot response before returning it to the user.

Personalized-GPTs or GPT-n, risk management

Domain-specific chatbots and conversational AI tools provide easy access to accurate information. However, potential risks from external data sources, such as inaccuracies or biases, should be acknowledged. In this study, we develop and implement domain-specific chatbots for the climate change domain. We compare three chatbot scenarios and found that the hybrid ChatClimate provids more accurate answers to 13 sample questions. We evaluate the answers internally, benefitting from the expert knowledge of co-authors. Since training LLMs is resource-intensive9, integrating them with the outside world by providing long-term memory and prompt engineering could yield better results with fewer resources. However, creating long-term memory requires caution. We used the IPCC AR6 as a comprehensive and reliable source to build external memory for LLMs, highlighting the importance of such databases for chatbot accuracy. Although there is an ongoing debate about pausing LLM training for some months until proper regulations are established, we believe that regulating LLM training, fine-tuning, and incorporating it into applications is necessary. Specifically, external database integration and prompt engineering should be considered in regulations for chatbots. Furthermore, training LLM models on huge amounts of data has a potentially very high carbon footprint and we have little knowledge about the carbon footprint embedded in LLMs such as GPT-437. However, inference and the use of already trained LLM models is less energy intensive.

Database setup: access to different databases

With the results of ChatClimate, we show how retrieval-augmented LLMs can be updated with more recent information. However, the design of the retrieval system plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of question-answering systems, particularly when specialized knowledge is required. To illustrate the impact of this design aspect, we scrutinized various database configurations. Generally, we constrain the retrieved information to the top-K results, which are selected based on the highest similarity metrics between the query vector and vectors sourced from climate databases (i.e., IPCC WGI, WGII, WGIII reports and the Synthesis Report 2023). While this approach ensures that sufficient information is retrieved to answer the question, it can be further tailored. For example, if there’s a need to include specific reports or additional data layers in the query results, our system offers unique flexibility. Instead of utilizing a single, centralized database, we can separate it into multiple specialized databases. This design allows for the option to direct queries individually to each database, enabling more precise and context-specific responses. We demonstrate the efficacy of this methodology by designing three separate databases: the first focuses on IPCC reports, the second exclusively includes the IPCC Synthesis Report, and the third incorporates recent publications from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (Table 5). This is only to demonstrate how updated science on top of the IPCC AR6 cycle could enhance the retrieval of information, and we do not claim that we have added all the new reports. There are many other sources that we did not include in our study (see 'Further development' in the 'Limitations and Future Works' section), and we only relied on the IPCC AR6 reports.

Table 5 Comparison of various databases in response to a question.

Limitations and future works

Hallucination prevention

Model hallucination is still an eminent unresolved problem in NLP. Although we have tried to force LLMs not to hallucinate by using external databases, up-to-date references, and prompt engineering, it still requires human supervision. For example, cross-checking the references ensures that the model is not hallucinating. Issues around mitigation of hallucination have been more elaborated in literature15,38. In future work, we will analyze how likely it is for ChatClimate to hallucinate, and we intend to automate the supervision process to reduce human effort.

Sufficiency and completeness of ChatClimate’s semantic search

The accuracy of the answers to user questions, as well as the sufficiency and completeness of these answers and the retrieved texts from external sources, depend on many factors. These factors include the top-k hyperparameter, the prompt, and data sources. ChatClimate answers questions based on the top-k relevant chunks retrieved. Therefore, there is a low chance that the semantic search neglects some critical text chunks for a question. In this study, we demonstrated the importance of having decentralized databases compared to a single centralized database where all data is stored and retrieved. However, this is still an important open research direction for our future work. In future work, we plan to focus on enhancing the quality of retrieved information, specifically by examining the difference between sufficiently retrieved information to answer a question and completely retrieved information for a more comprehensive answer. Another aspect that we will consider in future work is the impact of chunk size on retrievals. This will be the subject of research focusing on paragraph-level splitting rather than sentence-level splitting for retrievals.

Multi-modal search

The current version of ChatClimate does not support querying from tables, and interpretation of figures is also not supported. This is an ongoing research topic in the field of NLP, where search extends beyond textual data to include images, tabular data, and data interpretation. In future work, we will develop a multi-modal LLM where people can upload images and also ask questions based on existing tables and figures in the report. We welcome contributions in this regard.

Chain of Thoughts (COTs)

In this study, we did not fully explore the potential of chain of thoughts (COTs) by testing different prompts. However, we expect that implementing COTs will improve the accuracy of our system’s outputs, which we plan in our future works.

Evaluation of LLMs responses

We acknowledge that the evaluation of responses was not the primary focus of this work, and we relied solely on expert knowledge to assess the model’s performance. Additionally, further work is needed to provide a comprehensive description of the evaluation procedure, including aspects such as inter-annotator agreement and a more transparent explanation of query generation.

Fact-checking

Providing access for LLMs to various trustworthy resources can enhance the model’s ability to perform fact-checking and provide well-grounded information to users. In ongoing research, we are exploring the potential of automated fact-checking methods (e.g.35,36). To this extent, we are building an authoritative and accurate knowledge base that can be used to fact-check domain-specific claims39 or LLM-produced responses. In this knowledge base, we will also leverage statements from the IPCC AR6 reports to validate or refute claims related to climate change and other environmental issues.

Further development

We continually improve ChatClimate and welcome community feedback on our website www.chatclimate.ai to enhance its question-answering capabilities. Our goal is to provide accurate and reliable climate change information, and we believe domain-specific chatbots like ChatClimate play a crucial role in achieving it. It is important to keep ChatClimate up-to-date by automating the inclusion of new information from the scientific literature. To ensure the continual relevance and accuracy of ChatClimate, we plan to carry out regular updates. Specifically, these updates will be conducted in alignment with the release of comprehensive global assessments such as those from the IPCC. In particular, upon the release of any report from the Assessment Report 7th cycle, the relevant information will be integrated into our database to enhance ChatClimate’s knowledge base.

Conclusion

In this study, we demonstrate how some limitations of current state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4) can be mitigated in a Question Answering use case. We demonstrate improvements by giving the LLMs access to data beyond their cut-off date of training. We also show how proper prompt engineering using domain expertise makes LLMs perform better. These conclusions are reached by comparing GPT-4 answers with our Hybrid and Standalone ChatClimate models. In summary, our study demonstrates that the hybrid ChatClimate outperformed both GPT-4 and ChatClimate standalone in terms of the accuracy of answers when provided access to the outside world (IPCC AR6). The higher performance can be attributed to the integration of up-to-date and domain-specific data, which addresses the issues of hallucination and outdated information often encountered in LLMs. The results underline the importance of tailoring models to specific domains. The main findings of our work are summarized as follows:

  1. 1.

    The hallucination and outdated issues of LLMs could be refined by giving those models access to the knowledge beyond their training phase time and instructing LLMs on how to utilize that knowledge.

  2. 2.

    The core idea behind ChatClimate—providing long-term memory and external data to LLMs—remains valid, regardless of which GPT model is current. This is because there will always be reports (or other PDFs) published after the cutoff date for training LLMs, and ChatClimate can provide proper access to these documents, even without access to update the LLM itself. Similar arguments are made in22,40.

  3. 3.

    With proper prompt engineering and knowledge retrieval, LLMs can provide sources of the answers properly.

  4. 4.

    Hyperparameter tuning during knowledge retrieval and semantic search plays an important role in prompt engineering. We tested this by K-5, K-10, and K-15 nearest pieces of knowledge to the question in the semantic search between the question and the database.

  5. 5.

    Regulating LLM training, fine-tuning, and incorporating it into applications are necessary. Specifically, external database integration and prompt engineering should be considered in regulations for chatbots. We emphasize the importance of regulation for checking the outcomes of domain-specific chatbots. In such domains, users may not have enough knowledge to verify answers or cross-check references, making biased data or engineered prompts potentially harmful to end users.

  6. 6.

    Our AI-powered tool makes climate information accessible to a broader community and may assist decision-makers and the public in understanding climate change-related issues. However, it is intended to complement, not replace, specialized local knowledge and custom solutions essential for effective decision-making.

  7. 7.

    Retraining LLMs is computationally intensive, thereby generating a high amount of CO2 emissions. However, inference is comparatively less resource-demanding. In the retrieval-augmented framework we proposed, the necessity for frequent retraining of LLMs is substantially reduced. Consequently, the necessity to integrate new information through retraining is reduced. In evaluating the actual CO2 emissions, we reference the GPT family of models. However, OpenAI has not disclosed any information regarding their training procedures9. Nonetheless, we advocate for the LLM community to adopt climate-aware workflows to address this concern.

  8. 8.

    Our findings not only emphasize the importance of leveraging climate domain information in QA tasks but also highlight the need for continued research and development in the field of AI-driven text processing.

Methods

ChatClimate pipeline

In this study, we develop a long-term memory database by transforming the IPCC AR6 reports into a searchable format. The reports are converted from PDFs to JSON format, and each record in the database is divided into smaller chunks that LLM can easily process. The choice of the batch size for embeddings is a hyperparameter. We insert data into the vector database in batches of 100 vectors, based on the guidelines provided by Pinecone VD. We utilize OpenAI’s state-of-the-art text embedding model to vectorize each data chunk. Prior to injection into the database, we implement an efficient indexing mechanism to optimize retrieval times and facilitate effective information retrieval. Consequently, we can implement a semantic search that identifies the most relevant results based on the meaning and context of each query.

To elaborate, first, we created our database using IPCC AR6 reports (7 PDFs please see Supplementary Information for more details). Second, to enable the Large Language Models (LLMs) to access this long-term memory and to make these PDFs usable information for LLMs, we employed a PDF parser to digitize the pages of these reports and segment them into manageable text chunks. These chunks were then used to populate our external database, which feeds into the LLMs. Furthermore, we used an embedding model and a tokenizer to convert each chunk into a numeric vector, which was stored in our vector database.

When a user poses a question, it is first embedded and then indexed using semantic similarity to find the top-k nearest vectors corresponding to the inquiry. The dot product of two vectors is utilized to analyze the similarity between vector embeddings, which is obtained by multiplying their respective components and summing the results.

After identifying the nearest vectors to the query vector, we decode the numeric vectors to text and retrieve the corresponding text from the database. The textual information is then used to refine and improve LLM prompts. Augmented queries are posed to the GPT-4 model through instructed prompts, which enhance the user experience and increase the overall performance of our chatbot. Figure 3 shows the pipeline of ChatClimate.

Fig. 3: ChatClimate Data Pipeline: from creating external memory, receiving questions to accurate answers from IPCC AR6.
figure 3

The black arrows show the sequence of tasks in the ChatClimate pipeline. Langchain is the Python library we used for splitting text into smaller chunks. Tiktoken is OpenAI’s tokenizer. ‘text-embedding-ada-002’ is the embedding mode from OpenAI. GPT-4 is the large language model.

Tools and external APIs

The first tool used in this study is a Python-based module that transforms IPCC AR6 reports from PDFs to JSON format (PDF parser) and preprocesses the data, utilizing the powerful pandas library to access and manipulate data stored in dataframes.

The second tool is the LangChain Python package (https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain), which retrieves data from the JSON and chunks the extracted text into smaller sizes, ready for embedding. LangChain is a lightweight layer that transforms sequential LLM interactions into a natural conversation experience.

The third tool employed is OpenAI’s embedding model 'text-embedding-ada-002,' which vectorizes all chunks of the IPCC AR6 JSON files. Vector embeddings have proven to be a valuable tool for a variety of machine learning applications, as they can efficiently represent objects as dense vectors containing semantic information.

The fourth tool involves storing the generated vectors in a database, allowing for efficient storage and retrieval of the vector embeddings.

The fifth and final tool used is the GPT-4 'chatcompletion' endpoint with instructed prompts, which provides answers to questions by leveraging the indexed vector embeddings.

Input prompts and ChatBots

The importance of prompt engineering for LLMs has been addressed in previous work41,42,43. We designed three prompts to compare the answers of our chatbots (i.e., ChatClimate, hybrid ChatClimate, and GPT-4). The prompt used in our study consists of a series of instructions that guide the completion of a chat with GPT-4 on how to answer a provided question. The prompt is structured to allow the chatbot to access external resources while using its in-house knowledge. Overall, the prompt is designed to guide how to answer the questions given the availability of external and/or in-house knowledge. We demonstrate the three prompts used in this study in Boxs 3, 4, and 5.

Hybrid ChatClimate

In this first scenario, the prompt starts with five pieces of external information retrieved from long-term memory, followed by a question that was asked by the user. The prompt instructs the chatbot to provide an answer based on the given information while using its own knowledge. Moreover, the chatbot is structured to prioritize IPCC AR6 for answers, referencing the names and pages of corresponding IPCC reports (Working Group I, II, III chapters, summary for policymakers, technical summary, and synthesis reports).

ChatClimate

In the second scenario, the prompt starts with five pieces of external information retrieved from long-term memory, followed by a question that was asked by the user. The prompt instructs the chatbot to provide answers only based on IPCC AR6.

GPT-4

In the last scenario, the prompt does not provide any extra information or instruction on how to provide answers and can be considered the baseline behavior.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Background

Large Language Models

LLMs have transformed NLP and AI research over the last few years44. They show surprising capabilities of generating creative text, solving basic math problems, answering reading comprehension questions, and much more. These models are based on the transformer architecture45 and are trained on vast quantities of text data to identify patterns and connections within the data. Some notable examples of these models include GPT and BERT family models, which have been widely used for various NLP tasks1,2,3,4,9. The recent breakthroughs with models like T06, LLaMA5, PaLM7, GPT-31, and GPT-49 have further highlighted the potential of LLMs, with applications including chatbots8,9 and virtual assistants46. However, LLMs suffer from hallucination15, which refers to mistakes in the generated text that are simply made up or semantically incorrect. This can lead to vague or inaccurate responses to questions. Moreover, most of these models are trained on text prior to 2022 and thus have not been updated with new data or information since then15.

NLP and climate change

NLP techniques have been widely used in the analysis of text related to climate change. Applications range from financial climate disclosure analyses17,47, detecting stance in media about global warming48, detecting environmental claims49 and climate claims fact-checking50,51.

Question answering and chatbots

Question-answering (QA) systems and chatbots have become increasingly popular. They can provide users with relevant and accurate information in a conversational setting. The importance, limitations, and future perspectives of conversational AI have been addressed in the literature from the open domain52,53 to domain-specific chatbots54. When presented with a question in human language, chatbots automatically provide a response. Although numerous information retrieval chatbots accomplish this task, transformer-based LLMs have become the de-facto standard in QA1,4,8,9. In the context of climate change, QA systems and chatbots can help bridge the gap between complex scientific information and public understanding by providing concise and accessible answers to climate-related questions. Such systems can also facilitate communication between experts, policymakers, and stakeholders, enabling more informed decision-making and promoting climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies49,55. As the field of NLP and its application to climate change17,56 continues to advance, it is expected that QA systems and chatbots will play an increasingly important role in disseminating climate change information and fostering public engagement with climate science.

Long-term memory and agents for LLMs

One solution for enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in QA tasks is to fine-tune them on different datasets, which could be resource-wise expensive52. However, an alternative approach involves using agents that access the LLMs’ long-term memory, retrieve information, and insert it into a prompt to guide the LLMs more effectively57,58. These agents can decide which actions to perform, such as utilizing various tools, observing their outputs, or providing responses to user queries59. This approach has been shown to improve the accuracy and efficiency of LLMs in a range of domains, including healthcare and finance59. Domain-specific chatbots use a similar concept, where an agent has access to a carefully curated in-house database (long-term memory) to answer domain-specific questions60. These chatbots can provide customized responses based on the available information in their database, allowing for more accurate and relevant answers to user queries.