Exclusive Cisco is working on a new AI model that will more than double the number of parameters used to train its current flagship Foundation-Sec-8B.

The networking giant’s current hero model is Foundation-Sec-8b, an eight-billion parameter effort that it uses in several products, and suggests for use on tasks such as automated processing of security alerts, reviewing code to find potential security issues, and suggesting workflows that prioritize security.

At the Asia-Pacific edition of its Cisco Live event in Melbourne today, Cisco’s senior vice president and chief product officer for security, Raj Chopra, said Cisco is working on a new model that will use 17 billion parameters.

As was the case with Foundation-Sec-8B, Cisco will train the new model on threat information, incident summaries, red team playbooks, and other info it’s collected. Chopra said this new model will include data from Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence team, which has 30 years’ worth of data to contribute.

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Chopra told The Register this new model is not a successor to Foundation-Sec-8B, but instead a fresh effort because Cisco’s goal is to build a model that can both detect threats and advise on steps to address them. “And for that we need an expanded model,” he said, adding that it will appear “after Christmas, but not far after that.”

The senior veep said Cisco is working on “a whole phalanx” of new models and AI initiatives but didn’t offer any details. He did, however, point to the late October release of an update to the SecureBERT model, a tool designed as an aide to security professionals.

Chopra said Cisco helped the model’s developers to “enhance performance manyfold” in the new release.

Cisco develops LLMs because it believes organizations need a mix of generic security data and info describing their own affairs to effectively use AI in their defenses. The company's models are open source, but its AI efforts are not entirely altruistic as it uses them to power some of its products. Cisco also suggests its Splunk tools as the best way for customers to analyze their own data. ®