OpenAI engineers used population-level analysis of core dumps rather than case-by-case inspection to separate a mysterious recurring crash in its Rockset data infrastructure into two unrelated root causes: silent hardware corruption on a single Azure host and an 18-year-old race condition in GNU libunwind, a widely used open-source exception-unwinding library. An automated pipeline, partly written by ChatGPT, classified every production core dump from the prior year to enable this epidemiological approach. As an immediate mitigation, OpenAI switched Rockset from GNU libunwind to libgcc’s unwinder, and engineer Nathan Bronson upstreamed a reproducer and fix directly to the libunwind project.
