The CIA is using generative AI as a search engine
Intelligence agencies are using generative AI for a variety of purposes, including content triage and assisting analysts.
This article is heavy on the hype and my eyes are bleeding trying to abstract out what's actually happening here in reality
They use LLMs for what they can actually do, which is bullet point core concepts to a huge volume of information, parse a large volume of information for specific queries that may have needed a tech doing a bunch of variations of a bunch of keywords, before, etc. Provided you have humans overseeing the summaries, have the queries surface the actual full relevant documents, and fallback to a human for failed searches, it can potentially add a useful layer of value.
They're probably also using it for propaganda shit because that's a lot of what intelligence is. And various fake documents and web presences as part of cover identities could (again, with human oversight), probably allow you to produce a lot more volume to build them out.
damn they got their supply of good idea powder back
hide your defense budget before they start staring at goats again
Ah yes, the cia is no stranger to the artifice of intelligence.
Best case, this somehow causes the CIA to implode and the west to collapse along with it. Beworst case I’d have to give AI companies credit for providing the tools to said implosion. True worst case… I mean we are already there, i.e. the CIA exists and is operational.
Just a minor paragraph rewrite for clarity.
“The reality of generative AI is you’ve got to have a foundation of cloud computing,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy, whose compensation relies on him successfully growing Amazon's computer rental income, told Nextgov/FCW in a June 26 interview at AWS Summit. “You’ve got to get your data in a place where you can actually do something with it.”
It's always so tedious when these little conflict of interest notes are left out of articles.
They're not wrong. It's super expensive and time consuming to properly train a generative AI model.
That doesn't imply cloud computing is a hard requirement, just that a server (might be) a requirement.
In a different universe where the cloud / SAAS never took over the market, Cat-GTPurr could be distributed on mail order Blu-Ray disks or (in the worst case) a spinning drive or two, or downloaded once via bittorrent; and then hosted locally. The cost of such a distribution would be a rounding error for most big tech companies.