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From human intelligence collection to information gathered in the open, the CIA is leveraging generative artificial intelligence for a wide swath of its intelligence-gathering mission set today, and plans to continue to expand upon that into the future, according to the agency’s AI lead.

The CIA has been using AI for things like content triage and “things in the human language technology space — translation, transcription — all the types of processing that need to happen in order to help our analysts go through that data very quickly” as far back as 2012, when the agency hired its first data scientists, Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director of AI, said during an on-stage keynote interview at the Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

On top of that, AI — particularly generative AI in recent years — has been an important tool for the CIA’s mission to triage open-source intelligence collection, Raman said.

“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, GPT-3 was maybe toddler level intelligence, systems like GPT-4 are smart high schooler intelligence and in the next couple of years we’re looking at PhD level intelligence for specific tasks,” she said during a talk at Dartmouth.

Some took this to suggest we’d be waiting two years for GPT-5 but looking at other OpenAI revelations, such as a graph showing ‘GPT-Next’ this year and ‘future models’ going forward and CEO Sam Altman refusing to mention GPT-5 in recent interviews — I’m not convinced.

The release of GPT-4o was a game changer for OpenAI, creating something entirely new from scratch that was built to understand not just text and images but native voice and vision. While it hasn’t yet unleashed those capabilities, I think the power of GPT-4o has led to big changes.