Recently, Anthropic announced that they would be giving their latest model, Mythos, to a select number of companies rather than the general public due to its prowess in finding dangerous security vulnerabilities. Something that I found interesting surrounding the discussion of Mythos and its implications, was the idea that more modern languages are sometimes being encouraged in opposition to languages that allow memory manipulation and other low level capabilities like C and C++.
I wonder what the implications of this would be in certain industries. As far as I am aware, the reason so many video game developers rely on C++ is because it allows for greater efficiency thanks to, in part, the ability to manage memory manually. It seems like the strength of a language like C++ is also evidently its weakness.
I wonder if AI models will find that these lower level languages are much more easily exploited than modern languages. Only time will tell.
Furthermore, it's tough to tell if many companies really are trying to steer away from these lower level languages or if this was an overstated occurrence. My inclination is that, in reality, the number of companies making the decision to avoid certain languages due to security vulnerabilities is very few, both because of the different needs for these lower level languages as well as the feasibility of switching at this point.
On a team that primarily programs in C++, converting a codebase to a more modern language not only would take months if not years, but also would rely on the ability of many to potentially have to learn a new language as they convert code over. I've seen this on a smaller scale in the workplace and it seems like it's doable but may limit the ability of the team to make informed decisions.
On the flip side, it could be argued that the investment of adapting a new language is less and less and AI models do more and more of the actual coding. Food for thought.
