The Central Intelligence Agency is slated to roll out a new software tool to help it sift through the mountain of publicly available data, akin to ChatGPT, the popular chatbot created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
The agency's Open Source Enterprise division is set to give other intelligence agencies and analysts with the tool soon, Bloomberg reported, citing an interview with Randy Dixon, director of the division.
"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 the news outlet. "We have to find the needles in the needle field."
The tool will let users see the original source of the information and a cheat feature is a natural extension and will allow intelligence to be distributed easier and quicker, Nixon said.
The CIA did not say what model will be used to train the tool or how it will protect data from getting onto the internet, but that it will be available to 18 different agencies across the U.S., including the FBI, NSA and various parts of the military.
In March, OpenAI temporarily disabled the history feature of ChatGPT after some users reported seeing other users’ conversations.
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm in recent memory, resulting in an explosion of awareness and investment in general artificial intelligence. Generative AI is the result of large language models that are trained from various forms of content, including text, photos, videos, and more and results in new content based off the input.
On Monday, OpenAI, which received "billions of dollars" an investment from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) earlier this year, said that it had updated ChatGPT to "see, hear and speak."
The new AI tool from the CIA is amid a continued competition with China over AI. The Biden Administration has made several attempts to slow the rise of China's capabilities via export controls on the semiconductor industry - some of which have impacted Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) - on the back of national security concerns.