Yeah, with a budget assigned. This is actually just software development and security right?

Developers create software, which has bugs. Users (including bad guys, pen testers, QA folks, automated scans etc, etc, etc) find bugs, including security bugs, Developers fix bugs and maybe make more. It's an OODA loop, and continues until the developers decide to stop supporting the software.

Whether that fits into the business model, or the value proposition of spending tokens instead of engineer hours or user hours is fundamentally a risk management decision and whether or not the developer (whether OSS contributor, employee, business owner, etc) wants to invest their resources into maintaining the project.

While not evenly distributed, and not perfect, the currently available and behind embargoed tools are absolutely impactful, and yes, they are expensive to operate right now - it may not always be the case, but the "Attacks always get better" adage applies here. The models will get cheaper to run, and if you don't want to pay for engineers or reward volunteers to do the work, then you've got to pay for tokens, or spend some other resource to get the work done.

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sandeepkd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Somehow this reminded me of the historical efforts of some government bounty collections for mouse tails which were discontinued due to fraud (such as hunters breeding mice to collect the reward). There is a reason why/how devs and QA keep each other in check. Guess in case of LLM writing code, one has to use different models for dev and security checks.

On other hand, in real world, the developers learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future. However there is no feedback loop with enterprises using LLM with the agreement that the LLM would not use the enterprise code for training purposes

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ygjb 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the developers learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future

No. Humans learn from mistakes and try to avoid them in the future, but there is a whole pile of other stuff in the bag of neurons between our ears that prevent us from avoiding repetition of errors.

I have seen extremely talented engineers write trivial to avoid memory corruption bugs because they were thinking about the problem they were trying to solve, and not the pitfalls they could fall into. I would argue that the vast majority of software defects in released code are written by people that know better, but the bug introduced was orthogonal to the problem they were trying to solve, or was for an edge case that was not considered in the requirements.

Unless you are writing a software component specifically to be resilient against memory corruption, preventing memory corruption issues aren't top of mind when writing code, and that is ok since humans, like the machines we build, have a limit to the amount of context/content/problem space that we can hold and evaluate at once.

Separately, you don't necessarily need to use different models to generate code vs conduct security checks, but you should be using different prompts, steering, specs, skills and agents for the two tasks because of how the model and agents interpret the instructions given.

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noxvilleza 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you thinking of the cobra effect (aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) where people in India started breeding cobras to get the reward?

	▲	itishappy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Plenty of examples abound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre > Today, the events are often used as an example of a perverse incentive, commonly referred to as the cobra effect. The modern discoverer of this event, American historian Michael G. Vann argues that the cobra example from the British Raj cannot be proven, but that the rats in the Vietnam case can be proven, so the term should be changed to the Rat Effect.

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oytis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's pretty absurd to do it on AI-generated code though. If there is now an automated way to find vulnerabilities, coding models can be pretty easily trained to not introduce them

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scrollaway an hour ago | parent [-]

Tell me you don’t know how AI works without telling me you don’t know how AI works.

	▲	amazingamazing 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What are you talking about?