Following the announcement of Mythos and Project Glasswing, institutions throughout the world are grappling with the potential dawn of a new era of cybersecurity. In this post, we break down the current situation, discuss the role of openness, and situate the future of cybersecurity within the larger AI ecosystem. Mythos is a “frontier AI model”, a large language model (LLM) that can be used to process software code (among many other things). This follows a general trend in LLM development, where LLM performance on code-related tasks has recently skyrocketed. What’s particularly significant about Mythos is the system it’s embedded within: It’s the system, not the model alone, that has enabled Mythos to rapidly find and patch software vulnerabilities. Understanding this distinction is key to understanding the current landscape of AI cybersecurity. What Mythos demonstrates is that the following system recipe is powerful:

1. substantial compute power
2. models trained on troves of software-relevant data
3. scaffolding built to handle software vulnerability probing and patching
4. speed (enabled by compute power and the capital behind it)
5. some degree of system autonomy

Full analysis : AI and the Future of Cybersecurity: Why Openness Matters.