The CIA is building an AI model with “no limitations,” according to a director within the agency.
“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,” Randy Nixon, who was appointed director for the CIA’s Open-Sourced Enterprise, told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday.
Designed in the vein of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the technology will allow analysts to see the original sources of information, and likely incorporate a chat feature to assist with collecting and organizing data. The tool will be available across the 18-agency US intelligence community, including the FBI, NSA, and military agencies, with the goal of gaining supremacy over China’s developments in the field. Policymakers and the general public will not be allowed access to the tool.
“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,” said Nixon. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”
Nixon says the AI tool the CIA is developing would let analysts move to a process “where the machines are pushing you the right information, one where the machine can auto-summarize, group things together.”
“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,” said Nixon. “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.”
