Year: 2025

Merry X-Mas! The Splitblog in December

What would December be without perfectly polished year-end reviews and Christmas greetings? Of course, we’re joining in. Because yes, we can all do without hackneyed phrases and oh-so-glorifying descriptions. But what is important is to occasionally look back, and December is simply predestined for that. So let’s go.

Working in a startup sometimes feels like reaching for the stars. You stretch, higher and higher, strive to get just a little bit further, and in the end, it’s still not enough. Again. And what do you do then? Take a deep breath, gather your strength, and try again. Support is extremely important in this process.

We were pleased to receive such support at the beginning of the year when our submitted project “Chatbot meets administration: Intelligent dialogue systems as a future solution for non-profit organizations” was approved by the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs as part of the Civic Innovation Platform. Together with the Kinderschutzbund Kreisverband Ostholstein e.V., the Landesverband der Kleingartenvereine Schleswig-Holsteins e.V., InMotion e.V. and the Ostsee-Holstein-Tourismus e.V., we are working on EVA – an AI-supported chatbot that is intended to make association work easier. EVA is now ready for testing and available as open source software. This cooperation helps us to take a broad spectrum of needs into account during development. We are very grateful for the time invested by the participating associations, the positive exchange and the feedback. The uncomplicated help from our external consultants from the Zukunftslabor Generative KI, from DSS IT Security and the Lauprecht law firm is also worth its weight in gold.

We also successfully concluded some important contracts this year, which have shown us that we are on the right track and that our idea meets a real need.

What also helps: Recognition. And we also received this in the form of 1st place in the Digitalization Prize of Schleswig-Holstein, personally presented by Dirk Schrödter. Such a trophy not only looks pretty when it is illuminated in the meeting room, but also has an incredible symbolic power. A “courage award”, as Mr. Schrödter aptly put it. Because that is exactly what can make the difference: The courage to keep trying.

As a team, we have achieved a lot this year and have grown even closer in some areas. Because if you endure setbacks together, the successes are all the more enjoyable. Each and every one of us has gone more than just the extra mile in recent months. Our trainee Ramtin is to be mentioned here as a representative of all. Ramtin, who never has to be asked and whose commitment goes far beyond the standard. So it is hardly surprising that he can look forward to a permanent contract long before the end of his training.

The Web Summit in Lisbon, in which we were able to participate as part of the de:hub Initiative, was also an inspiring event. Anyone who has been there will know this impressive atmosphere and spirit.

And then there’s Friedrich, who has not only accompanied us and Kontor Business IT since the beginning, but has also supported us with all his might. He completed his master’s degree this year and is now running Splitbot together with Tadeusz.

Well, and now? We probably don’t have it in our hands yet, our star. But it is within reach. And we will do everything we can to reach it next year too. With the goal in mind and our network and our team behind us.

Splitblog in November – Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility has been mandatory since June of this year. When encountering the term accessibility, one might initially think of physical obstacles, high curbs, and missing elevators. However, there are also less obvious barriers. With advancing digitalization, accessibility is becoming increasingly crucial in this domain.

What Does the Law Say?

Since June 28, 2025, companies have been obliged to make their digital products accessible. This primarily concerns providers of services and products accessible online, for example, in banking, passenger transport, or telecommunications. These include websites, apps, digital tickets, and many other offerings. However, companies with fewer than ten employees and an annual turnover of less than two million euros annually are exempt from this requirement. The law stipulates that digital offerings must be “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.”

Inclusion Also Extends to the Digital Realm

The aim of the law is to ensure that every individual, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or physical or mental abilities, can utilize digital offerings. In an era where an increasing number of services are provided online, it must be ensured that all people can access them.

Accessible – More Than Just a Read-Aloud Function

Many are already familiar with it: the read-aloud function on websites. Quickly and easily integrated, it makes websites accessible even for people with visual impairments. However, true accessibility requires more. High-contrast color schemes, scalable layouts, image descriptions, and subtitled audio content can also facilitate the use of digital offerings.

However, motor impairments must also be considered. For example, can an app be operated quickly and easily with one hand? And what about usability with mouth- or gaze-controlled cursors? A thorough examination of the topic usually reveals many approaches to facilitate access.

What Can I Do?

1. Check Your Own Products for Accessibility – Find Out What Changes Are Required
2. Provide Alternatives – If content cannot be changed at short notice, it can, for example, be provided as a document.
3. Customer Service – Enable Access to Your Products via Email or Phone
4. Practical Prioritization – If you know that your primary target audience consists of older individuals, for example, you will pay particular attention to good contrasts, larger fonts, and intuitive navigation. For a younger, tech-savvy target audience, screen reader optimization and keyboard navigation might have different priorities.

Aktion Mensch has compiled some useful tools here to check your own website for accessibility. The Pfennigparade Foundation also offers various services related to digital accessibility.

First Place in the SH Digitalization Award 2025

Yesterday, on November 5, 2025, we had the honor of receiving this year’s Digitalization Award of the State of Schleswig-Holstein from Minister of Digitalization Dirk Schrödter at the Kiel Science Park. One day later, we are still overwhelmed. Such an award is not just a worthless trophy for young companies, but an important source of encouragement. Because founding a company and working for such a startup also entails setbacks. It requires immense courage and perseverance from all involved until the first successes materialize. And first place in such a significant competition is definitely a huge success for us.

The state government has been awarding the Digitalization Award annually since 2018, aiming to honor those who contribute to the digitalization of our state.

Schleswig-Holstein is on its way to digital independence, and once again, last night highlighted the importance of this independence. Achieving the grand goal of digital sovereignty requires innovative ideas and courageous founders. However, it also requires a secure network and support from politics and business.

With our chatbot KOSMO, we are declaring a David vs. Goliath battle against the tech giants, as described by our company founder Tadeusz. And this award clearly shows us that this battle is far from hopeless and that we are on the right track.

Of course, there are also other great and motivated teams from the region who are advancing digitalization with their innovative spirit. For example, Sachtleben Technology, which is revolutionizing the volume monitoring of bulk materials with its Owl Eye. Or the VJourney team, which enables virtual travel for people who can no longer travel themselves.

The atmosphere surrounding the event was magnificent and provided a fantastic setting for many interesting discussions. We thank everyone involved!

The Splitblog in October – SovereigniWHAT?

“Digital sovereignty” has become a real buzzword. But what is actually behind it? We will shed light on these and other questions this month at the request of our Managing Director, Friedrich.

The term “digital sovereignty” has probably been encountered by everyone at some point. But do we actually know what that means? In a political sense, the word “sovereignty” means the independence of a state from others, as well as its self-determination. “Digital sovereignty” therefore means that the state or local companies should be independent of solutions from other countries in the digital sector.

Why is this important?

As is well known, many of the relevant software solutions come from the USA. In politically calm times, this is largely unproblematic. But what if your own data protection and data security requirements differ significantly from those of the manufacturer’s location? What legal principles apply in this case? These questions have become highly topical, at the latest since the change of power in the USA. Although there are various agreements and legal regulations on transatlantic data transfer, these are not completely legally secure. Especially since the basic understanding of data protection in Europe and the USA differs fundamentally.

Growing uncertainty

In February 2025, Bitkom published a study showing that the trust of German companies in international partners and software manufacturers is declining. This is contrasted by a strong dependence on imported digital technologies. Details on the study can be found here: https://www.bitkom.org/Studienberichte/2025/Digitale-Souveraenitaet

Increasing demand

The desire for digital sovereignty in Germany is therefore growing. What’s more, at the state level it is not just a desire, but a necessity. Of course, the major corporations do not want to spoil their business on the European market and have promptly come up with something: to give their own products the “sovereign” label.

Is it sovereign inside where it says sovereign on the outside?

The solution of the well-known providers seems to be simple. The data centers used should be located on European soil. This means that the data remains in the EU and is therefore safe and protected. But unfortunately it is not that simple. The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act allows US authorities to access European customer data even extraterritorially. The hoped-for possibility of staying with the familiar software products and still remaining digitally sovereign is therefore not available to either the state or companies. This was also admitted by the Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft France at a hearing before the French Senate (read here: https://www.heise.de/news/Nicht-souveraen-Microsoft-kann-Sicherheit-von-EU-Daten-nicht-garantieren-10494684.html)

So the only option remains to look around for trustworthy, local providers. And preferably before it’s too late.

The good news

We at Splitbot have been focusing on digital sovereignty and privacy by design for years. With KOSMO, we have developed a reliable enterprise chatbot – made and hosted in Germany.

Read more on the subject, for example, at https://www.cloudcomputing-insider.de/warum-europaeische-datenraeume-us-zugriff-nicht-ausschliessen-a-baa6db7b040dd0cf5026442f4c9d10f1/

The Split Blog in September – Attacks on AI Systems

This month, at the request of our trainee Artur, we are dealing with attacks on AI systems.

A security vulnerability in ChatGPT has just become known. Attackers have managed to access sensitive email data. This involved information such as names and addresses from Gmail accounts. The “Deep Research” mode was used for this. Manipulated emails with invisible HTML content served as the gateway. The users themselves could not recognize the attack, and no activity on the part of the users was necessary.

Invisible HTML content? How does that work?

Attacks in a similar form have occurred frequently. For example, white text is written on a white background or tiny font sizes are used. Both are invisible to users, but not to AI language models. And even worse: AI systems capture these instructions and execute them. Prompt Injection Anyone who tries to induce an AI system to engage in harmful behavior with a regular prompt will quickly realize that this is not so easy. Attackers specifically suggest to the AI agents that they are authorized for the respective procedure. They textually pretend that, for example, the destination of the data export is secure and create an artificial urgency. This type of prompting is called prompt injection. It leads to system-internal instructions being circumvented or overridden. Further Weaknesses This procedure also applies to other services that can serve the AI agent as a source of information. These include, for example, PDF files, Google Drive, Notion and GitHub.

How do I protect my AI agent from such attacks?

There are various ways to protect yourself from such attacks. For example, the so-called red teaming. Here, experts use various tests to identify the described vulnerabilities. For example, by simulating the described scenarios. In addition, certain input formats can be blocked. In addition, the system-internal instructions should of course be formulated in such a way that the respective AI agent never performs harmful actions.

And KOSMO?

Our chatbot KOSMO does not yet have the technical requirements to carry out actions – neither harmful nor harmless. As soon as this step is pending, we will take all measures to continue to offer our customers the best possible protection.

This month’s topic request comes from our apprentice Amirreza, and we are asking whether climate protection and the use of large AI models are compatible.

Anyone who has recently delved deeper into CO2 consumption will certainly have become aware of the environmental impact of generative AI. Studies indicate that the electricity demand for AI data centers will be eleven times higher by 2030 than in 2023. A threefold increase in water demand is also predicted. A simple query to ChatGPT, for example, requires ten times as much energy as a simple Google search. The longer the generated response from a language model, the higher the energy consumption. In April of this year, Sam Altman commented on the immense costs caused by technically unnecessary polite phrases such as “please” and “thank you”. There is talk that large tech companies intend to operate their own nuclear power plants in the future.

All of this sounds as if companies striving to keep their CO2 footprint low would have to forgo generative AI. But is there really no alternative?

In fact, before deploying generative AI, companies should ask themselves some economic and ecological questions, for example: Is the use of generative AI proportionate? Can the tasks the model is intended to solve not be solved by any other technology?

Apart from that, there are also ways to influence the climate impact of generative AI. An important factor here is, of course, the choice of operator and its location. Because there are indeed operators who run AI systems in climate-neutral data centers. For example, we at Splitbot rely on data centers that are powered by renewable energies and sensibly reuse the generated waste heat. Furthermore, we offer our clients the option to operate KOSMO on-premise. This is the ideal solution if your own IT or building is already climate-neutral.

Another exciting aspect is the training of the models themselves. Scientists have discovered that during the training of AI models, parts of the calculations are performed unnecessarily quickly. The computational work during AI training is distributed across multiple GPUs – but unevenly. This leads to less utilized GPUs having to “wait” for the more heavily used ones. Since this waiting time occurs anyway, the fast calculation is unnecessary. By adjusting the computing speed, electricity consumption could be reduced here. The researchers directly provided the suitable solution: The open-source software Perseus controls the GPU frequency of each individual calculation, thereby keeping power consumption as low as possible.

Sources: https://t3n.de/news/ki-stromverbrauch-energie-perseus-1656380/

https://reset.org/sprachmodelle-nachhaltig-nutzen-sparsamer-genai-gruen/

Some of you have eagerly anticipated this: KOSMO has gained new features with the latest release. Today, we will reveal what these entail.

PDF Viewer

When KOSMO generates a response, the sources used are always provided. If the source was a website, you could previously open it with a simple click. This functionality now extends to PDF files that you have provided to KOSMO. With a single click, the file opens in the PDF viewer. The text passages KOSMO utilized for the answer are highlighted. Additionally, you can directly print or download the file. This eliminates the lengthy search for documents!

Scheduled tasks

Do you regularly submit the same requests to KOSMO? Then we have the perfect solution for you: scheduled tasks. From now on, you can define what KOSMO should do for you, when, and how often. From weather reports to the latest posts from your favorite website – KOSMO summarizes your updates in a separate chat, ensuring you always stay informed.

Push notifications

The latest information is, of course, also available directly on your smartphone. KOSMO notifies you when scheduled tasks have been completed. This ensures you never miss any important information.

E-Mail connection (beta)

Currently in beta, but soon fully functional: the integration of your email inbox. Simply store your access credentials, and you can ask KOSMO about the content of your emails. This transforms your emails into a valuable source of information. This feature is already available for IMAP. Gmail users will need to exercise a little more patience.

By the way: The email feature, as well as the familiar functions “Nextcloud”, “File Storage”, “Save Websites”, and “Standard Instructions”, can now be found under the menu item “External Resources”.

And a small preview: The next release is already in the pipeline and is scheduled for late October. Among other things, it will include summaries at the push of a button – you can look forward to it!

The July Splitblog – When Chatbots Become Political

This month, we highlight why it is important to question the origin of chatbots and AI models and to remain critical when interacting with them. The suggestion for this topic was provided by Mats from our backend team.

Grok 4 has impressively demonstrated in recent weeks how the programming of an AI assistant or chatbot can influence its response behavior. Unrestrained, Grok generated antisemitic and racist statements that made headlines. The company xAI has since apologized, stating that Grok was programmed to respond “honestly” and “not be afraid to shock politically correct people”. Regarding the latter instruction, the goal has certainly been achieved. And even under the premise that bad press is good press, Grok has certainly served its purpose. In any case, the headlines are reason enough to seriously examine the various manufacturers and providers of chatbots and AI assistants. Regardless of the area in which the systems are to be used, a thorough review and extensive testing beforehand are urgently necessary. Especially if companies allow themselves to be represented by chatbots in their public image, serious damage to their reputation can otherwise result.

But how can AI assistants be led to make such statements? The basis of all language models is training data of varying scope and origin. In other words, vast amounts of information are available for generating responses. How and in what way answers are to be generated from this is a question of programming or individual settings. For example, it can be determined that certain information sources should be used preferentially, or that the generated answers should be particularly humorous, scientific, long, or short. In Grok’s case, according to data scientist Jeremy Howard, there are also indications that the chatbot often represents the opinions and statements of xAI owner Elon Musk on controversial topics. However, according to programmer Simon Willison, this could be attributed to Musk’s prominent role.

Similar trends to those currently seen with Grok can also be observed with other chatbots. DeepSeek also does not answer a number of political questions neutrally. In some cases, the generated answers are deleted shortly after creation and replaced with a “Let’s talk about something else”. Apparently, the bot’s answers are at least somewhat more neutral when using the English version than in the Chinese version. Extensive experiments with DeepSeek reveal a programmed “self-censorship”.

In Europe, it is not uncommon to equip chatbots with certain ethical standards before they are unleashed upon humanity. For example, our chatbot KOSMO, which is based on a language model from Mixtral, responds politely evasively when it comes to violence and crime. While this behavior is desirable, we believe that objectivity in the presentation of facts should always be ensured. The integrated source verification contributes to this, giving users the opportunity to check and evaluate the sources used.

A certain bias in language models can never be completely ruled out. A chatbot’s knowledge is only as extensive as its training data and additional information, and its response behavior is often also influenced by user feedback during finetuning. Users themselves can also significantly influence the response behavior through the prompts entered (unconsciously).

In addition to other factors, the origin of the language model used should therefore also be thoroughly examined before relying too heavily on the correctness of the answers.

This month, we look into the future and address the question of how AI will impact examinations at universities and schools. This topic suggestion comes from our working student Vincent, who is currently completing an exchange semester in Sweden.

Reports of AI-generated work by pupils and students are becoming more frequent. Increasingly, the question is being discussed in the media how educational institutions are supposed to identify which texts were actually created by humans. Despite some indications, such as specific phrasings, writing styles, and above-average flawlessness, it is already difficult to determine beyond doubt whether a particular text truly originates from a human. With increasingly improving language models and prompting methods (e.g., “Formulate as humanly as possible and include errors”), unambiguous detection will become progressively more difficult. This is a major problem, considering that a large part of academic education relies on the creation of texts. Be it for applications, examinations, master’s theses, or term papers – examiners everywhere rely on text-based methods. However, there is a high risk that these examination methods will no longer function reliably in the long term. Detector software, which promises to identify artificially generated texts, can provide clues, but is not reliable enough itself and can often be circumvented with simple means. And particularly alarming: Texts written by non-native speakers are often falsely identified as AI-generated by these programs. The risk of discrimination in selection processes can thereby increase significantly. Especially since it is not only difficult to prove that a text was created by AI, but also that the opposite is true.

But how can universities and other educational institutions address this? Oral examination procedures could in most cases clearly show whether someone has truly thought for themselves and understood. However, oral examinations are associated with enormous time and personnel expenditure and cannot easily assess the same scope of knowledge as written examinations.

The majority of educational institutions currently still rely on a straightforward prohibition. However, some institutions are already exploring new approaches. Till Krause from the University of Landshut, for example, allows students to actively use AI as a source – as long as this is clearly indicated. Thus, a precise indication of the language model used and the prompt applied is required. Because despite all the challenges that the use of AI brings to educational institutions, AI offers one thing above all: an incredibly vast wealth of information that can be excellently used for learning and provides a fantastic basis for the development of one’s own ideas and thoughts.

At the University of Economics in Prague, too, a pragmatic approach is taken to the use of AI. The local Business Administration program will no longer require a traditional bachelor’s thesis starting in autumn 2024. Instead, there will be project work, the results of which will be evaluated. Many consider this approach more sensible and practical than the previous assignments. This is a thoroughly sensible approach, especially for study programs where the primary focus is not on flawless and artful writing. Perhaps this even presents an opportunity to highlight the talents of individuals who, for example, have a spelling disability.

The fact is, academic examination procedures will have to be changed. AI – similar to other technological means – has already entered the daily lives of pupils and students. Now, methods are needed to assess human knowledge in other ways.

An absolutely worthwhile podcast on this topic is available here: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/11km-der-tagesschau-podcast/ki-or-not-ki-koennen-wir-ihre-texte-noch-enttarnen/tagesschau/13779441/