A Conversation with Michael Brown

This episode of Unsupervised Learning features an interview with Michael Brown, a principal security engineer at Trail of Bits, who leads their AIML security research group. Brown discusses the design and concepts behind Buttercup, Trail of Bits' AI-driven system that took second place in the AI Cyber Challenge. He details the system's modular pipeline approach, which combines conventional software analysis with AI to find and patch vulnerabilities. Brown also shares insights on the effective use of AI in security, emphasizing the importance of problem formulation, tightly constrained applications, and the limitations of large language models in tasks requiring ground truth and deterministic outcomes. He advocates for a balanced approach, leveraging traditional tech for deterministic tasks and AI for specific, well-defined sub-problems to avoid compounding errors.