AI technology has already proven to play a major role in transforming and disrupting a wide range of industries, and in fact, it’s only just getting started.
Microsoft, which has gone ‘all in’ on artificial intelligence, has developed a generative AI model specifically designed for US intelligence agencies. Unlike other AI platforms, such as Microsoft’s own Copilot, this platform will be ‘air gaped’ and will not require a potentially insecure connection to the internet.
Bloomberg notes: “It’s the first time a major language model has operated completely separate from the internet… Most AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, rely on cloud services to learn and infer patterns from data, but Microsoft wanted delivering a truly secure system to the U.S. intelligence community.”
18 months of development
The tool allows intelligence agencies to use AI for tasks such as analyzing large amounts of classified data, without fear of data breaches or hacks that could compromise national security.
William Chappell, Microsoft’s CTO for Strategic Missions and Technology, said Bloomberg that the company spent 18 months working on this special GPT-4-based tool, which can read and analyze content, answer questions and write code without having to go online. Equally important, the system reportedly will not learn from, or be trained on, the data it receives.
At a security conference last month, Sheetal Patel, CIA deputy director for the Transnational and Technology Mission Center, said: “There is a race to get generative AI on intelligence data, and I want that to be us.”