How DHS is hustling to leverage—and contain—generative AI
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan , a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I dive into the Department of Homeland Security’s use of AI to assist in domestic security. Also, I take a close look at Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold 3 tool, which may eventually illuminate drug discoveries that are beyond the reach of human intelligence. Also, rumors of an OpenAI search tool heat up.?
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How the Department of Homeland Security uses AI
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which employs 260,000 people, is responsible for protecting the U.S. from everything from drug smuggling to election interference. The department is made up of smaller agencies, most of which are constantly collecting all kinds of threat data and signals. So, like U.S. defense and intelligence, the DHS hopes AI systems can make sense of all this (often messy) data. In fact, the White House has mandated it: The DHS is mentioned 37 times in President Biden’s executive order on AI.?
Discovering subtle patterns in signal data can mean the difference between preventing and suffering an attack. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week that his department? has already used AI to find the unique signature of a vehicle loaded with fentanyl approaching the Southern border. When DHS agents had only an old photo of a child trafficking victim to go on, they turned to an AI system to generate an image of the child’s likely current appearance.?
While the DHS is learning how to use AI internally, it’s also charged with helping to mitigate the inherent risks of the new technology. During a small roundtable with journalists at the RSA conference Tuesday, Mayorkas said his agency is keen “to ensure that we are mindful of its potential to do harm in the hands of an adverse actor and to defend our critical infrastructure against its malicious use.” Without proper guardrails in place, a generative AI system could spit out detailed directions for building a nuclear device, or the recipe for a deadly bioagent.?
Click here to read more about the DHS’ push to integrate AI across the board.
Google DeepMind may usher in a rich period of discovery in biology
Google’s DeepMind released this week a new version of its AlphaFold AI system , which can not only predict the structure of proteins, but also model how proteins interact with other cell structures, including DNA, RNA, and small molecules that are often used in drugs. This accelerates researchers’ work to model how a new drug might react with various receptor sites in the body.
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While AlphaFold can predict hundreds of millions of structures and interactions within the cell, it’s still just a small subset of the universe of possible interactions that could be triggered when, for example, molecules in a new drug design are introduced in the cell. “Even if you just think about the small molecule drug space, the number of [possible] designs is something like 10 to the sixtieth, which is just so outrageously large you can’t even comprehend it,” said DeepMind researcher Josh Abramson on a call with reporters Tuesday. Using AlphaFold might be something like carrying a toy flashlight into a pitch-black Superdome. Sounds daunting, but it’s out in that big dark space where scientists may find an AIDS vaccine or a cure for cancer. AI (coupled with quality training data and massive compute power), might be science’s best hope of navigating toward recipes for drugs so complex, or novel, that they’re beyond the reach of human intelligence alone.?
Click here to read more about how AlphaFold can change the game for drug discovery.
Is OpenAI going to release a search engine or not?
This week, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was getting into the internet search game to take on Google. (The Information reported the same thing back in February .). It’s quite possible the rumors are true. There is demand for a new way of searching the web: Gartner predicts that traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026, mainly due to chatbots and other virtual agents.?
It was the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 that got a lot of people thinking that having a conversational back-and-forth with a chatbot might be a better way of getting information off the web than typing keywords into Google and wading through an ad-cluttered list of links. An OpenAI search tool would likely look a lot like ChatGPT, but with the added ability to check its prompts and answers against a web index.?
Click here to read more about OpenAI’s race to develop AI-native search.
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