AI technology has already proven to be instrumental in transforming and disrupting a wide range of industries, and it is really just getting started.
Microsoft, which has bet “everything” on artificial intelligence, has developed a generative AI model designed expressly for the US intelligence services. Unlike other AI platforms, such as Microsoft's own Copilot, this one will be “air gapped” and will not require a potentially insecure internet connection.
Bloomberg notes: “This is the first time a major large 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 to offer a truly secure system to the US Intelligence Community.”
18 months of development
The tool will allow intelligence services to use AI for tasks such as analyzing large amounts of classified data without fear of data leaks or attacks that could compromise national security.
William Chappell, CTO of Strategic Missions and Technology at Microsoft, said Bloomberg that the company spent 18 months working on this special GPT-4-based tool that will be able to read and analyze content, answer questions and write code without needing to connect. What is equally important is that you will reportedly not learn or receive training on the data you receive.
At a security conference last month, Sheetal Patel, CIA deputy director for the Center for Technology and Transnational Missions, said: “There is a race to bring generative AI to intelligence data, and I want it to be us.”
