Systems

Vol. 22 No. 6 – November/December 2024

Systems

Retrofitting: Principles and Practice

Retrofitting radically new functionality onto production software tests every skill of the programmers craft. A practical case study illuminates principles for bolting new tricks onto old dogs.

by Terence Kelly, Ziheng Aaron Su

The Price of Intelligence:
Three risks inherent in LLMs

The vulnerability of LLMs to hallucination, prompt injection, and jailbreaks poses a significant but surmountable challenge to their widespread adoption and responsible use. We have argued that these problems are inherent, certainly in the present generation of models and likely in LLMs per se, and so our approach can never be based on eliminating them; rather, we should apply strategies of "defense in depth" to mitigate them, and when building and using these systems, do so on the assumption that they will sometimes fail in these directions.

by Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Santiago Zanella-Béguelin, Yonatan Zunger