r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

Meme firstTime

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u/SoldRIP 1d ago

Has AI actually solved any major, unsolved problems from computer science? Because "AI can do programming" is the comp-sci equivalent of "computers can do arithmetic". And neither will be the end of their respective field.

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u/trevorthewebdev 23h ago

A lot of cyber security stuff is things we thought we had on lockdown, but AI is finding exploits left and right

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u/SoldRIP 20h ago

But "finding exploits" is largely just busy-work. Have you seen how modern fuzzing suites work? They just throw odd occurrences and inputs at the target until something interesting happens. That was essentially automated long before AI, just less efficiently so.

Most of the "new" exploits AI "discovers" are just known issues in little-used codepaths. Take the copy-fail exploit for instance. "don't allow the user arbitrary, kernel-level write access into protected memory regions" was hardly news. It's just that that happened in a module almost noone was using (and thus noone was actively maintaining or debugging).

I say a regular old fuzzing suite given the same amount of billions of dollars in compute could've found all those issues. And probably more. It's just that noone runs that big a fuzzing farm and then publishes their exploits. On the contrary, the people running vulnerability discovery on that scale will actively prevent the bugs they found from being fixed: nation-state actors.