alt Hacker NewsI mean that, unlike SQL injection, there is no way to draw a boundary between user provided data and the system prompt. It can't be done. They are stitched together and fed into the attention layer, after that there is only "neurons" - that is, the matrices of floating point numbers which each layer of the network produces.
You cannot separate data that was input by the user and data that is from the system once it is mixed together like that. Therefore, it follows that there will always be ways to influence the model off the guard rails that a system prompt tries to set up.
Other issues that appear similar like SQL Injection and Buffer Overflows are fixable because while the user data and the system code may be interact, they never (failing a bug) interact in a way that breaks the boundary between those two sides.
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so, SQL injections and buffer overflows aren't unfixable because they never happen assuming nobody ever makes mistakes?
under the same assumption you can just train your model until the output is correct
This argument makes no sense. Data coming to your network adapter is also "stitched together and fed".
Ok in the SQL example imagine if you had a SQL engine that issued commands encoded in ASCII in the high byte of 16 bit characters, and all non-command data as ASCII in the low byte of 16 bit characters.
If user input can only be in the low byte, it cannot influence the command structure.
A similar thing could be done with embeddings, a provenance embedding that cannot be set by user input could serve a similar role.
>You cannot separate data that was input by the user and data that is from the system once it is mixed together like that.
You can train a model to not mix things, many models are trained to separate things. A neural net with X and Y outputs for a position does not just occasionally decide to flip the outputs. Sure it could be trained to reverse the output, but it is also easy to train something to the point that you have a high confidence to never do that.