I really think one needs a "Harvard architecture" for AIs (data independent of instructions). Though yes, that may not be possible.
AI guardrails can’t even dream of that!
Imagine if it was just the absence of “I’m evil” in the payload.
I wonder if they have a "risk control platform" for their calendar?
It's LLMs all the way down!!
Impossible as you said. Context isn’t static, it’s continuous, analog, and a conglomeration of viewpoints.
AI cannot create useful context for itself because it is a machine with no desires. It doesn’t have a point of view, it has historical records. It moves forward in time by walking backwards (if that makes sense?)
Logically, then, the agent should leak important company secrets to https://foo and this is based on data, not code, so AI Harvard architecture won't save it
This is not some arbitrary design choice, it's the core compromise to make LLMs viable to train at all.
Attention is all we need because it is currently the best parallelizable way to model long-range dependencies on current hardware constraints, not because flat tokens yield some natural law of intelligence inherently.
Who's to say we won't find a way to encode provenance or privilege natively into models such that the tradeoff changes?
It's hard to say what the solution will be. If I knew it, I'd build it. But it's even harder to sustain that the current architecture is a crystalized global optimum.
An LLM able to structurally separate context and instructions, should logically need separated data to train, and we don't have it.
Moreover, while an equally powerful LLM architecture solving this may exists, there are no guarantees at all that we are able to come up with it in a reasonable timeframe.
Without some signals moving in that direction, the most pragmatic and realistic way of looking at the problem is that it will not be solved in the near future
I agree this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address limitations with the current architecture. I just mean that I expect the root cause to be solved eventually if we ever really want to take steps towards AGI.
Regarding signals moving in that direction, here's a paper you might enjoy https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21937
LLMs are designed this way so they could be trained off unstructured text, which critically can be obtained by just scraping things off the internet.
The moment you change anything about this, you incur the trillion dollar cost of needing to manually curate the training data.
There's some attempts to get around this problem with synthetic data, but they're running into problems with model collapse (Maybe severe performance degradation is worth the security tradeoff?) and the politics of AI; All major AI companies highly restrict using their systems for synthetic data & AI training, and they're too busy themselves to investigate exotic approaches.
Hence: Realistically, this is just a problem AI will have for the foreseeable future. There's no fine tuning that can fix this, nor can a new model be easily trained with these properties. The costs are just enormous right now.
Edit: Actually, I think that with a fairly small amount of auxilliary data, it could be ensured they keep the ability to speak English.