Cybersecurity is the True Frontier for Generative AI Success or Failure
For AI researchers, this paper posits that cybersecurity should be prioritized as a benchmark for general AI progress, but it is an opinion piece without empirical results.
The paper argues that cybersecurity presents a more challenging and comprehensive test-bed for generative AI than natural language or computer vision, due to its scale, adversarial nature, labeling difficulty, latency requirements, and need for explainability.
Cybersecurity is a real-life test-bed for many machine learning problems at once, especially when considering modern strides in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate processes as ``agents.'' Cybersecurity workflows require orchestrating hundreds of standard and bespoke tools through various formats. The scale of cybersecurity data is enormous; for example, a single malware sample can be viewed as a sequence of billions of tokens. The cost of labeling any file by experts is enormous and labor-intensive, in part because an adversary (possibly a well-funded nation state actor) is attempting to subvert your detection methods. Even skilled experts may disagree on the correct label, creating ambiguity in what constitutes ground truth. When deployed, models must run quickly on billions of items a day, where low-latency is critical for operational success, in a continuously changing environment. In addition, explainability is not optional: analysts demand clear reasoning for model decisions to cope with the large number of false-positive alerts they face daily, and to quickly develop remediation and understand how something went wrong. In short, the amount of complexity cybersecurity is greater than that of natural language and computer vision, and thus we posit that cybersecurity is the better test-case for general AI progress than other, well-studied fields.