Reports indicate that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is poised to unveil a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, akin to Openai’s Chatgpt, to significantly enhance investigative efforts. Randy Nixon, the head of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division, explained that this innovation will empower users to effortlessly trace back to the original sources of the information they are amassing.
CIA Eyes Generative AI Technology
The CIA is on track to unveil a generative AI chatbot, echoing the capabilities of OpenAI’s Chatgpt or Anthropic’s Claude. The spotlight on AI has intensified in 2023, and the U.S. government’s intelligence arm is gearing up to launch its distinct AI asset. This tool, however, will remain off-limits to U.S. bureaucrats and the general populace, with Nixon emphasizing its stringent adherence to privacy laws.
“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Nixon told Bloomberg on Thursday. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”
In the span of the past eight months, generative AI has soared to prominence, with dominant players raising billions of dollars to propel this technology forward. It has seamlessly integrated into various sectors of society, including the realms of finance and the burgeoning cryptocurrency ecosystem. Yet, the ascent of this technology has bureaucrats and regulators on edge, prompting plans to institute regulations.
In July, Gary Gensler, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, acknowledged the potential of employing AI for market surveillance and enforcement. The CIA’s AI tool is slated to fortify the broad 18-agency intelligence alliance across the United States. When it comes to the CIA’s AI capabilities, Nixon underscored an expansive horizon, stating, “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.” Nixon added:
The scale of how much we collect and what we collect on has grown astronomically over the last 80-plus years, so much so that this could be daunting and at times unusable for our consumers.
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