Intel hopes to burn newly open-sourced AI debug tech into chips

Intel Labs has big plans for a software tool called ControlFlag that uses artificial intelligence to scan through code and pick out errors. One of those goals, perhaps way out in the future, is to bake it into chip packages as a last line of defense against faulty code. This could make the information flow on communications …

[Filippo]

Reducing manual verification?

First of all, with 1 real bug found out of 104 detected anomalies, there is no way you can use this at runtime. Not even if it gets a lot better.

Secondly, in order to decide whether it can reduce manual verification, we'd need to know the rate of false negatives. If it catches some bugs but misses others, then you can't stop the manual verification you're already doing. Which means the tool would add manual verification, with the amount added depending on the rate of false positives (which looks horrible, although it may improve). This may not be a bad thing, if it does catch the odd bug which would otherwise have slipped.

[alain williams]

There must be another security problem ...

unintentionally hidden in this somewhere - along the lines of Meltdown & Spectre.

Lots of good intention - but why not make this part of an emulator, eg Valgrind, rather than bake it into silicon - where it will just use more energy ?

[Mister Dubious]

Daisy, Daisy

"Open the pod bay doors, ControlFlag."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

[Neil Barnes]

[github] ... is this code that I can trust?

Well not mine, anyway.

[elsergiovolador]

Maths and chance

Hmm

104 anomalies, of which one was a security vulnerability. But it also found 96 false positives

That is certainly an area of improvement to get that more developer friendly because [a] 50 per cent false positive rate is just not super great,

Why is this even an article? They could just replace it with a random number generator they already have in some CPUs and get the same accuracy...

It's worrying that Intel has gone so low.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, a CPU attached to an rs232 port to take the debug/crash dump at point of fail. And be on the rest of the time to do god knows what…

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly does "code" mean?

Quote 1: "...ran ControlFlag on a proprietary piece of internal production-quality software with millions of lines of code..."

Quote 2: "Intel sees ControlFlag possibly being baked into chips to make data communication channels more efficient."

What exactly does "code" mean? Quote #1 implies that it's C or Rust or Python3 or Java or xml or html or bash scripts being scanned...i.e. text-based, human readable. Does Quote #2 imply that binaries can also be scanned?

Maybe Intel want to implement HAL in every silicon CPU......you know "I'm sorry Dave, I can't run that!"

[William Towle]

Re: What exactly does "code" mean?

> Maybe Intel want to implement HAL in every silicon CPU......you know "I'm sorry Dave, I can't run that!"

A new answer to "does it run linux": "no, it refused to"?

// fortunately -->