Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the department’s Chief Data and AI Officer (CDAO) Matthew Graviss today announced the launch of a new online AI resource hub at the agency.
AI.State will serve as a central hub “for all things AI in the department,” Blinken said during a keynote address at the State Department this morning.
“It offers formal and informal training, including already videos that are up there to help folks get started,” Blinken said. “It’s a home for all of our internal State Department AI tools, libraries of prompts, and use cases.”
“I would just say, try it out,” he added. “And also, lend your own ideas and input because this is something that will continue to be iterative and a work in progress.”
In a conversation with CDAO Graviss, Blinken highlighted some of the ways generative AI is helping the workforce become more efficient.
“I can’t remember a period of time when we had a greater multiplicity of challenges and a greater complexity of challenges and an interconnectedness among those challenges,” Blinken said. “What I’ve seen already in the way we’re looking at and using AI is an ability to make greater sense more quickly of all of that complexity, to see the interconnections more immediately, and to help us make sense of the world and where we want to take it.”
“How do we deal with a time when all of us, all of you, are being asked to do more with less? Precisely because there’s so much more on our plates – it’s more complicated – and yet we’re challenged for resources,” Blinken said.
“If we can have technology, like AI, that genuinely frees up people’s time to make sure that some of these more routine tasks can be done quickly, that otherwise if we were doing them would a lot longer,” he said. “That is an incredible source of freedom and opportunity for the workforce to make sure that it’s focused on what really matters, and to use the value added that we bring to each task.”
Graviss said that the department’s new generative AI tool for media – dubbed Northstar – was launched “a couple of months ago” and is offered in more than 200 countries and in over 100 languages to help foreign service officers translate articles.
“[It’s] able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world, to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over 100 languages, and then immediately translate, synthesize, and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space,” Blinken said. “Work, again, that would take hours or actually be impossible to do with that many inputs on a daily basis. So, this is an incredible tool for our [public diplomacy] officers.”
Separately, the department has also launched an internal chatbot – called StateChat – that the State Department’s Chief Information Officer Kelly Fletcher first teased in April.
She explained during a panel today that her team was able to identify problems with StateChat during its pilot phase through red teaming and fix the vulnerabilities before it was released at scale. For example, she said they were able to access prompts and information that employees were inputting.
Graviss explained that his team within the CDAO is able to analyze “tens of thousands” of prompts that employees are inputting into StateChat so they can understand how the “power users” are leveraging it and package that into training material for the new AI.State resource hub.
The department’s Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Uzra Zeya has been dubbed as the first champion of AI at the agency.
She explained today that her team was able to launch an AI research assistant – called the DCT (data collection management tool) – in February 2023 that reduced by one-third the 52,000 hours a year employees spent on research.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg because, with the DCT, there is an AI language translation tool that translates 90 languages into English … in a matter of seconds – work that could have taken hours, if not weeks, to produce,” Zeya said. “[It’s] going to deliver over 30,000 hours in officer time saved, which will free up, again, our colleagues’ time to get from behind their screens into the arena to help move the needle on some of our most pressing human rights, human trafficking, religious freedom concerns around the world.”
She added, “I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and I think this is an example of technology supporting not supplanting [the workforce].”
Zeya highlighted that her team’s generative AI tool is now available at AI.State for all employees to take advantage of.
“Any of you all can use that now,” she said. “I really commend to you to take this on, take advantage of all the hard work that’s gone into this, and see how it can transform your own work.”
The department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Elizabeth Allen emphasized that the new AI.State resource hub has even the most basic AI resources, like videos on how to start a ChatGPT account; what a good prompt looks like; and the department’s approved AI platforms.
