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Core dump epidemiology: fixing an 18-year-old bug

OpenAI identified and fixed an 18-year-old bug in a core dump processing pipeline that had silently omitted certain types of crash data. The bug, caused by an integer overflow in a data structure size calculation, affected the completeness of epidemiology analyses used to improve system reliability. The fix uncovered previously hidden patterns in system crashes.

Background

OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-4. A "core dump" is a snapshot of a computer's memory at the moment it crashes, used by engineers to debug software. An "epidemiological" approach means tracking a problem like a disease outbreak across a population. The company discovered a bug in its internal infrastructure that had been present for 18 years — nearly as long as the company has existed (founded 2015). Engineers traced it by analyzing crash reports across many systems, improving reliability for the AI models that power ChatGPT and its API.

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