Rethinking Software and Software Engineering in the Era of Foundation Models... - Ahmed E. Hassan 

Rethinking Software and Software Engineering in the Era of Foundation Models (SE4FMware) - Ahmed E. Hassan, SAIL - Queen's University
Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models. We refer to software built using FMs as FMware. The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents, and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges. Based on our extensive experience in this domain in particular and Software Engineering in general, we identified 10 key SE4FMware challenges that have caused FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky. In this talk, we discuss some of these challenges in detail and state the path for innovation that we envision. We hope that the disclosure of the aforementioned challenges and our associated efforts to tackle them will not only raise awareness but also promote deeper and further discussions, knowledge sharing, and innovative solutions across the software engineering discipline. More info at: fmse.io/ and 2024.aiwarecon... and ttps://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15943