Article

2024-05-09 Cyber

US spies to use secretive AI service from Microsoft

[FoxBusinessNews] Microsoft's AI platform for US intelligence agencies has been deployed and is in a testing and accreditation stage.

U.S. intelligence agencies will soon be using a secretive generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform from Microsoft that will let America's spies safely use AI models in the process of analyzing sensitive data.

Microsoft's generative AI model for intelligence agencies aims to get around security issues that stem from large language models' (LLMs) connection to the internet, which typically is used as a resource for training those models. Bloomberg reported that the AI tool is the first major LLM fully separated from the internet.

William Chappell, Microsoft's CTO for strategic missions and technology, told Bloomberg the AI tool was deployed to an "air-gapped" cloud environment isolated from the internet and features a model based on GPT-4 along with supporting tools. The company announced the new product at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness this week.

"This is the first time we've ever had an isolated version — when isolated means it's not connected to the internet — and it's on a special network that's only accessible bythe U.S. government," Chappell told Bloomberg.

If it’s completely disconnected from the internet, perhaps it’ll take longer for the AI to become a racist, sexist neo-Nazi…

Chappell told Bloomberg the new AI platform from Microsoft is structured so that it can read files but not learn from them in a way that would impact its output or from the broader internet.

"You don't want it to learn on the questions that you're asking and then somehow reveal that information," he told the outlet.

The new AI tool, which Chappell said could theoretically be accessed by about 10,000 members of the intelligence community who have access to top-secret data, went live Thursday and will enter a testing and accreditation phase before it can go into broader use by the intelligence community, according to the report.

Posted by Skidmark 2024-05-09 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11140 views ] Top

#1
MS Win-10 had a quietly released <100kb patch last week... for "some" systems/

Posted by 2024-05-09 06:42|| 2024-05-09 06:42|| Front Page Top

#2 AI Analysts.
What could go wrong.

Posted by Skidmark 2024-05-09 07:41|| 2024-05-09 07:41|| Front Page Top

#3 Copilot is much like Wikipedia. Utterly benign when used to look for unpoliticized information. If you want to know about Bromine Hexaflouride or the Smith chart, it won't steer you wrong.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 07:50|| 2024-05-09 07:50|| Front Page Top

#4 I wish I could just dump MS and Windows, but I have so much legacy info it is not possible. I am currently Mac based; not perfect, not bad, but I can't run things like Inventor. I am stuck.

Posted by Whiskey Mike 2024-05-09 08:42|| 2024-05-09 08:42|| Front Page Top

#5 Your data you can bust out any time you want. Good luck using linsux.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 09:29|| 2024-05-09 09:29|| Front Page Top

#6 Oh, don't get me wrong, linsux is amazing if you dig the command line.

If you don't know what that is, Bwahahahahahahaaaa...

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 09:33|| 2024-05-09 09:33|| Front Page Top

#7 What I love about Windows is all the third-party extensions are about "it just not ghey enough."

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 09:35|| 2024-05-09 09:35|| Front Page Top

#8 I have two hard drives on my PC and I can boot from either one of them. Some specialized software is only available for Windows so I can boot into Windows for those occasions when I need it. But it tries my patience. It is sooooooo sloooowwwwwww and bloated. The good folks at Microslop program advertisements into Windows and all kinds of other crap that I do not need or want.

Browsers are available for Linux and they are far superior to Internet Explorer or Edge or whatever they're calling it these days.

An office suite is available in Linux that works a lot like Word and Excel only faster, better and for free.

All kinds of other applications are freely available.

The command line in Linux is a great way to get behind the scenes and find out what is really happening. You can program your own scripts to automate all kinds of tasks that would either take a lot longer to do on Windows or else they would be absolutely impossible. I admit, I worked with it for years and learned how to use it. I guess Windows is for those technophobes who shudder at the thought of a command line.

I worked with Windows too and that's why I don't think the US intelligence agencies are being very intelligent if they chose Microsoft's AI platform.

Posted by Uleating Theger5049 2024-05-09 11:48|| 2024-05-09 11:48|| Front Page Top

#9 is for those technophobes who shudder at the thought of a command line.

That would be the OS that runs my iPad so I don’t have to do anything more complicated than a few HTML thingies when prepping articles for Rantburg.

It’s not that I’m a technophobe, but I lack the mental energy to keep up with all the changes since Lotus 123. My darling 98-year-old mother, who is a technophobe, gave up in 2018, but she’s the kind of person who went to medical school in a foreign country she’d never been to, taught in a language she didn’t know… for the fun of it (and to get away from her mother and whatever the title is for the mother of one’s dead husband — who conspired together to find her a replacement for him).

Posted by trailing wife 2024-05-09 13:30|| 2024-05-09 13:30|| Front Page Top

#10 I use the Insider builds that most will never see. If Windows is slow on your computer you have a trash piece of old hardware or a lot of cruft Microsoft never asked you to load on your instance.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 13:43|| 2024-05-09 13:43|| Front Page Top

#11 TW, your iPad has iPadOS on it. Halfway between iOS on a crapple phone and MacOS on the tragically overpriced Mac hardware.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 13:45|| 2024-05-09 13:45|| Front Page Top

#12 People who cry about Windows are the over dramatic sorts Shakespeare made fun of in his works.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 13:47|| 2024-05-09 13:47|| Front Page Top

#13 #6 Ahhh takes one back to the days of "mouse pusher!".

Posted by Rex Mundi 2024-05-09 13:48|| 2024-05-09 13:48|| Front Page Top

#14 I started out on VAX and UNIX, still have instances of SuSE and FreeBSD in VMs. But I earn my daily bread on Windows (have done so since the late 80s) and make no apologies.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 13:51|| 2024-05-09 13:51|| Front Page Top

#15 The entire point of UNIX was to make the most of slow, expensive hardware. Hardware is stupid cheap now and linsux is still living in hippie land. We have RISC-V now and we need a new lightweight OS. There are several candidates. Time will tell.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 13:57|| 2024-05-09 13:57|| Front Page Top

#16 Many people have asked, what if MacOS was available on third party hardware? It sort of is, if your idea of fun is home dentistry. Crapple abandoned the server space (a huge market). Gee, I wonder why. It's true the internet runs on linsux but right here, what has Rantburg uptime been this year. Definitely not "five nines."

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 14:02|| 2024-05-09 14:02|| Front Page Top

#17 Re #8, Powershell can do anything you can do in BASH. You can even import your scripts. Saying linsux is "more powerful / accessible / flexible" just shows you don't really know that much.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 14:22|| 2024-05-09 14:22|| Front Page Top

#18 Putting a Windows Server instance in at home once all the Arrow Lake hardware is sorted.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 14:32|| 2024-05-09 14:32|| Front Page Top

#19 If you own a slow computer that's on you, not the computer.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 15:08|| 2024-05-09 15:08|| Front Page Top

#20 Two visions of the results come to mind:
1) Queries receive a google-esque rebuke that it is racist to doubt the integrity of foreigners
2) Microsoft's coders "nudge" our evaluations.

Posted by James 2024-05-09 15:45|| https://idontknowbut.blogspot.com 2024-05-09 15:45|| Front Page Top

#21 Look. It's a tool. If you need to use a hammer where a jewelers screwdriver is called for, that's on you. If you look up political stuff on Wikipedia or Gurgle you get what you get. If you ask Copilot how to fix an Onan generator that won't start you won't get a lefty green sermon.

GIGO has become a two way street.

Posted by M. Murcek 2024-05-09 16:00|| 2024-05-09 16:00|| Front Page Top

#22 Generative AI does not do analysis. It generates things that are similar to other things that the neural network was trained on.

Everyone has gone nutty lately over Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT due to their surprisingly coherent text generation. It gives the impression of intelligence but LLMs at their core are simply good at predicting the next word in a sentence. One known problem with LLMs is their ability to generate "facts" like non-existent legal cases, fake bibliographic references, and imaginary computer code libraries. The actual term of art for this is hallucination.

AI is a broad topic despite our fixation on LLMs. There are classifiers that can find patterns in huge piles of multi-dimensional data. Image recognizers can make sense of scrawled hand-written zip codes on envelopes, or identify perps from security camera footage or read x-rays better than a trained radiologist. Anomaly detectors can give you a clue that something is about to go wrong, like the funny noise an engine bearing has been making or whether that BANG was a gunshot or a car backfiring. Useful stuff, but like everything created by the hand of Man, not always fool-proof.

Rather than analysis, I suspect this will be used to generate targeted "content" like Daily Mail articles. See the Trump to send US special forces hit squads to Mexico to assassinate drug cartel leaders in second term article in WoT Background for an example. Marketing and media campaigns will never be the same. Welcome to the brave new world!

Posted by SteveS 2024-05-09 19:46|| 2024-05-09 19:46|| Front Page Top

#23 Bless you, SteveS. Calm perspective is a wonderful thing to bring to the table.

Posted by trailing wife 2024-05-09 23:38|| 2024-05-09 23:38|| Front Page Top

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