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points by spartanatreyu 3 days ago | 0 comments
> How did we get to the point where there are a thousand privilege escalation exploits in the kernel?

> > We developed AIs that can find them.

We could already find them before AI.

We already knew they were there, and we already knew how to prevent them in the first place.

See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705794

[–] antonvs 3 days ago
Why do you think we didn’t find these 948 vulnerabilities before now?
[–] spartanatreyu 2 days ago
Because people weren't building/using the tools that prevent those vulnerabilities in the first place. See that link for previous discussion.
[–] esseph 3 days ago
> We could already find them before AI.

Not at this speed and cost.

[–] spartanatreyu 3 days ago
> Not at this speed and cost.

I'd argue that the resources (i.e. time, money and effort) needed to create the tooling that would have prevented all of these issues would have been orders of magnitude less than the resources that have gone into "AI".

[–] azan_ 3 days ago
It’s a bad argument. AI isn’t single use. Current iteration of AI is already there and serving it is cheap. So you get great tool for detecting these issues in the future at low cost. Without AI the cost wouldn’t really decrease with time. And also it costs me 200$ now to find these bugs. I don’t think I could hire software engineer for that much.
[–] spartanatreyu 2 days ago
> It’s a bad argument. AI isn’t single use. Current iteration of AI is already there and serving it is cheap.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, it doesn't seem related to what was said before.

---

> So you get great tool for detecting these issues in the future at low cost.

Detecting issues doesn't stop the issues getting created in the first place.

The goal should have always been to make the issues impossible in the first place.

> Without AI the cost wouldn’t really decrease with time.

The cost of what? AI has a front-loaded cost, just like producing better tooling.

> And also it costs me 200$ now to find these bugs. I don’t think I could hire software engineer for that much.

Tooling that prevents the bugs in the first place is effectively free once it has already been made.

[–] azan_ 1 day ago
I'll address only last point because everything else stems from that.

> Tooling that prevents the bugs in the first place is effectively free once it has already been made.

Surely you understand that such tooling is basically impossible to create and even if it was impossible it would be so horrendously expensive and hard to implement that AI would actually turn out to be cheaper. Under the false assumption that such tools could be produced you are right, but that assumption is absurd.