When a byline starts with "coders need to" I immediately start to tune out.

It felt like the analogy was a bit off, and it sounds like that's true to someone with knowledge in the actual domain.

"If a company, eager to offer a powerful ai assistant to its employees, gives an LLM access to untrusted data, the ability to read valuable secrets and the ability to communicate with the outside world at the same time" - that's quite the "if", and therein lies the problem. If your company is so enthusiastic to offer functionality that it does so at the cost of security (often knowingly), then you're not taking the situation seriously. And this is a great many companies at present.

"Unlike most software, LLMs are probabilistic ... A deterministic approach to safety is thus inadequate" - complete non-sequitur there. Why if a system is non-deterministic is a deterministic approach inadequate? That doesn't even pass the sniff test. That's like saying a virtual machine is inadequate to sandbox a process if the process does non-deterministic things - which is not a sensible argument.

As usual, these contrived analogies are taken beyond any reasonable measure and end up making the whole article have very little value. Skipping the analogies and using terminology relevant to the domain would be a good start - but that's probably not as easy to sell to The Economist.

  > When a byline starts with "coders need to"

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-The-Economist-sometimes-have-...