The CIA is set to launch its own ChatGPT-style AI tool to sift through mountains of data for clues in ongoing investigations.
The Central Intelligence Agency’s latest initiative aims to mirror its famed OpenAI technology and will use artificial intelligence to help analysts better access open-source information, agency officials said.
The CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division developed the technology, which is also intended to be rolled out across the US government’s 18 intelligence agencies in an effort to rival China’s growing intelligence capabilities.
“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic Internet, to big data, and on and on,” said Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s AI division.
Noting that analyzing the level of data on the Internet is a significant challenge that the AI program could help address, Nixon added, “We need to find the needles in the needle field.”
The CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division has developed a ChatGPT-like AI program that will be rolled out across the US government’s 18 intelligence agencies
The push to add artificial intelligence to the US military and intelligence apparatus comes amid increasing pressure to compete with China’s advancing power on the world stage.
In particular, it is feared that China will take a big lead in the race to master artificial intelligence and aim to become the world leader by 2030, according to .
In an ominous look at the country’s use of the programs, China developed a “prosecutor” in 2021 that could identify and file charges with 97 percent accuracy.
In contrast, the US law enforcement sphere has also come under fire as it struggles to harness the power of AI in investigations, but Nixon said the new program will help condense the unprecedented levels of information floating around the internet.
One of the CIA’s new capabilities under the AI tool will be the ability to see the original source of any information they view.
Nixon added that the program, like ChatGPT, will let officers use a chat feature to receive information in the most concise manner possible.
“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions to the machines to give you answers, also based on sources,” he continued.
‘Our collection can just keep growing and growing, without any limitations except what things cost.
Nixon was appointed in January as the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise director, where he was expected to “accelerate the agency’s development in open source intelligence just as the field is becoming increasingly concerned and rivalry in Washington,” said .
Randy Nixon, the head of the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division, praised the agency’s new technology, claiming it “could have no limitations other than how much things cost.”
China’s embrace of artificial intelligence has some concerned that America could be falling behind, with the country even introducing an AI news anchor earlier this year.
To shape its ever-expanding AI operation, his division will reportedly draw information from public and commercially available sources.
However, the push to implement AI in intelligence gathering comes at a time when experts are still unsure of the technology’s red flags, including its potential for access to the CIA’s information over the open internet.
Although it will not be made available to lawmakers in Washington, Nixon said the program will be rolled out to all 18 U.S. government intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the NSA and all military branches.
In August, the Defense Department launched a task force to investigate the use of the technology, including to better understand its drawbacks.
Months earlier in May, the director of the NSA, Gilbert Herrera, said this that the intelligence community was still trying to find “a way to take advantage of these big models without violating privacy.”
In announcing the new AI initiative, the CIA reportedly did not detail how it would protect the information it collects from the apparently vulnerable technology, nor what model it would use.
Nevertheless, Nixon emphasized the need to keep up with the relentless amount of data streaming over the Internet.
“The size of how much we collect and what we collect has grown astronomically over the last 80-plus years,” he said. “So much so that this can be disheartening and sometimes unhelpful for our consumers.”
He added that the Ai tool would help analysts work like never before because “where the machines are feeding you the right information, one where the machine can automatically summarize, things can be grouped together.”