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Posted by sohkamyung 11 hours ago

OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005(www.cryptocellar.org)
543 points | 354 commentspage 5
tamimio 8 hours ago|
So OpenAI and anthropoc business model it seems like this:

-hype or fear monger

-release the scary all-knowing model

-milk subscriptions and api in the first two months or so

-nerf the said scary model and use the excess compute and money acquired in an “internal model”

-internal model make hype or fear monger

-repeat

BenoitEssiambre 6 hours ago||
Now that's passing the Turing test for real.
simianwords 10 hours ago||
"They are trying to generate hype before the IPO so that they can cash in before the bubble bursts"
qarl 10 hours ago||
Maybe I'm wrong - but it seems like some strange form of competitiveness.

They don't care about the advancements themselves, only that the advancements are some sort of cheating that shouldn't "count".

Humanity is profoundly unsettled by AI and is responding with avoidance and denial.

howunfortunate 10 hours ago||
I think it was Roon who said it months ago: "Too many people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble."
goatlover 5 hours ago|||
Like killing all of humanity? Agreed, we're not prepared for that.
johnsmith1840 10 hours ago||||
It can be AGI and still be a bubble?

The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.

jjjee 10 hours ago|||
Shh. Some people aren’t capable of understanding nuance.
howunfortunate 10 hours ago|||
Yes, a huge range of possibilities exist. Including that the valuations are exactly accurate, or even too low.

I think the quote above is best as written, with a big emphasis on the "if"

johnsmith1840 9 hours ago||
Most internet evaluations were lower than what happened. Buuuut, a bubble must pop to answer those.
b38484848 10 hours ago||||
the opposite is also true
howunfortunate 10 hours ago||
Do you figure?

I'm pretty AGI-pilled, and I feel perfectly emotionally prepared for if AI stayed at its current capabilities and the S&P dropped 25%.

b38484848 7 hours ago||
well a lot of people are really not prepared for the sp to drop even 15% I can tell you that
pixl97 10 hours ago||||
Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.
willy_k 10 hours ago|||
This dichotomy is counter-productive. The valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction. At the same time, this stuff is clearly going to change how to world works in countless, deep ways. But the idea that some fancy autocomplete can replace humans ignores the reality of humanity and the fancy autocomplete.

It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.

Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.

john_strinlai 10 hours ago|||
i dont think humans are going to be replaced either, but calling the thing that solves millennium problems and is currently changing multiple industries entirely a "fancy autocomplete" makes it harder to take any point you are making seriously.
qarl 10 hours ago|||
The "auto-complete" thing is a false framing.

Complete this sentence: "You can solve world hunger by..."

Intelligence is required to finish sentences. It's not just a Markov chain.

mossTechnician 10 hours ago|||
Leaving aside the fact we have solutions for things like climate change and will not implement them, regardless of who or what recommends them... My keyboard offers "You can solve world hunger by using a Ted Bungie algorithm." Which sounds reasonable on its face until I research Ted Bungie and the algorithms he developed.

Granted, my phone keyboard lacks a substantial dictionary, offers words instead of tokens, has a very small context window, and doesn't randomize outputs (Ted Bungie is its primary recommendation every time), but those are basically parameters to the existing autocomplete.

willy_k 10 hours ago|||
Fair point. In that case, it’s imperative you share this* with your local representative: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab29440-6944-83ea-853f-8060dc58da...

*This un actionable summary of existing discourse. The real world doesn’t produce traces or take HTTP requests.

qarl 10 hours ago||
You're straw manning me.

Obviously there is no solution to world hunger right now. Nevertheless - finishing sentences is not pattern matching - and it's extremely obvious that whatever is going on inside LLMs is not pattern matching.

willy_k 10 hours ago||
Language is absolutely pattern matching, and the whole thing is that the more patterns you put in, the more the transformer can pull out what’s useful. Agents are this effective because people figured out that training on tasks being completed gets the models to complete tasks - that’s pattern matching.

And it can only go so far, where those patterns are feasibly captured, eg internet discussions and coding and mathematics. It won’t measure up to the scaling laws of the physical world.

qarl 8 hours ago||
> Language is absolutely pattern matching

OK - so long as you also agree that language is thought.

Until the advent of LLMs - language was considered the pinnacle of human intelligence. But humans have some need for mysticism at the root of their beliefs - so they chase the gaps in our knowledge. Like "God of the gaps."

Sure, world models will help navigate physical space; they are effectively the animal mind. Will they help unwind the laws of the universe? Probably not at all. Language is sufficient. Because it is thought.

willy_k 8 hours ago||
Language reflects thought. LLMs are a search function over text, text that reflects previous thought; they cannot create.
qarl 8 hours ago||
> they cannot create

Every single day we have new and wondrous examples of the things LLMs have created.

Clearly we are using very different definitions of the word.

willy_k 8 hours ago||
Synthesize != create. A new combination of existing things is different from a new thing
qarl 7 hours ago||
Music is combined notes. Stories are combined words. Newton combined existing mathematics to produce calculus.

I'm wondering if you can name anything that counts as a "creation" under your definition?

willy_k 5 hours ago||
Stories and music, their character, comes from combined motifs and themes. These are what gives them meaning. Creation is tied to meaning; one can’t separate human meaning out of the conversation. Without human meaning - new perspectives gained, beauty found - all things are equivalently pointless, and all an LLM is doing is shifting (very high-order, having gone through the steps to end up in training data) entropy around.
qarl 4 hours ago||
No - I mean my question genuinely. I'd like you to name one specific creation that isn't a combination of what has come before it.

I'd rather get specific than talk about hypotheticals.

brewcejener 8 hours ago||
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001100000 10 hours ago||
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_s_a_m_ 9 hours ago||
The bullshit machinery is going full blast lately, the correct title: researcher uses Astra to decipher a message nobody really bothered or cared to decrypt.

Is ClosedAI running out of money or what is going on?

pantsforbirds 9 hours ago|
The constant goalpost moving is insane. This is objectively an amazing result.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago|||
Is it? Personally I only found the story interesting because of the contents of the message, not because GPT-6 Math Scoopa was the one to stand on everyone else's shoulders and get its grubby little fingers into the cookie jar. Computer does thing that computers should ostensibly be good at is a middling goalpost – what's more intriguing is the implication that the model might have stolen private info or scooped someone else to get there once again.
saberience 10 hours ago||
How many of these "news" articles are we going to get?

This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.

So we have entered an age where an army of know-nothings direct models to old forgotten tasks so they can get 15 minutes of un-deserved attention?

skeledrew 10 hours ago||
If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.
miyoji 10 hours ago|||
> If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.

What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.

skeledrew 9 hours ago||
Well at least the skill aspect will soon become so niche that essentially nobody will bother with the investment. So on reflection maybe not permanently, just mostly bored.
latexr 9 hours ago|||
I doubt it. For “skill” there are any number of sports; for “imagination” there are any number of stories and other mediums. It’s not like every human has just decided to roll over and not do anything anymore; quite the contrary.
sigmar 10 hours ago|||
First time I'm seeing this. I had heard about the WWI ciphertext crack[1] but not this one, are you confusing the two?

[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...

dumberquestions 10 hours ago|||
This wasn't possible just months ago and for many who haven't been following closely this is still newsworthy, probably not for long, though.
daitangio 10 hours ago|||
yes and no. AI is great for patter-maching and finding solution by "assonance".

I agree with you that these are not "trilling" discovery but they can be worth something anyway.

Like you, I do not like this news also because I think they will be used to just "push" the next two IPOs (Anthropic, OpenAI).

chrisjj 8 hours ago|||
> in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.

At best, dumb brute force computation power.

It is about as meaningful as news that a computer found the 10....0th digit of Pi.

embedding-shape 10 hours ago|||
> This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.

So like half of all useful human inventions are to you not interesting just because it happened by dumb luck?

pixl97 10 hours ago|||
Yea, it's kind of odd how "sour grapes" people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was.

Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".

>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"

staticman2 10 hours ago||
Actuallllly these hypothetical people from a few hundred years ago hypothetically said you are an awful person for misrepresenting them, stop putting words in their mouth, thank you!
mossTechnician 10 hours ago|||
A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting.

A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.

IAmBroom 6 hours ago||
To you.
dominotw 10 hours ago||
Just reflects how much of modern "work" is just dumb shit that we need to be freed from.
willy_k 10 hours ago|||
The reason these are unsolved is because no-one was working on them.
pixl97 9 hours ago||
So you're telling me that any problem a human starts working on gets solved simply because they are a human?

Lets stop and think about this, there is now a machine that can solve a bunch of problems that have not been solved simply because there wasn't enough people with knowledge to work on them, and all we have to do is supply power to get the answers?

Irrational hate causes one to be blind.

latexr 9 hours ago||
> So you're telling me that any problem a human starts working on gets solved simply because they are a human?

No? I don’t think that’s what they’re saying at all.

> there is now a machine that can solve a bunch of problems that have not been solved simply because there wasn't enough people with knowledge to work on them

That “simply” is doing a ton of work. A big reason there aren’t enough people with knowledge to work on these problems is that their basic needs aren’t met. If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems, maybe they wouldn’t still be unsolved.

> and all we have to do is supply power to get the answers?

That is again, quite reductive. The harms caused by LLMs, both environmental and societal, are much larger than “just supply power”.

> Irrational hate causes one to be blind.

Funny how it’s always the ones who disagree who are irrational and blind.

pixl97 9 hours ago||
>If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems

There is no world in which this was ever going to happen or it already would have. Simply throwing out a counter-factual without explaining how any incentive for that path of reality to work means you can make any claim and tell others it's obviously true with no evidence.

>disagree who are irrational and blind

Incorrect. The dialectic is how progress is made. Getting mad and turning off your brain is a different story.

latexr 8 hours ago||
> There is no world in which this was ever going to happen

That’s the point. The incentive structure we have is bad. That’s the criticism.

> Simply throwing out a counter-factual without explaining how any incentive for that path of reality to work means you can make any claim and tell others it's obviously true with no evidence.

Again, you’re adding things to the argument which weren’t said. There is as reason “had been” was used.

writtenone 10 hours ago|||
Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!
varispeed 10 hours ago||
More likely is that the solution was in the training data somewhere. Astra is incredibly dumb for a model - at least after it's got nerfed.

5.6 Sol is much more capable.

podgorniy 8 hours ago||
UPD2. I threw the original question to gemini3.8 in antigravity. LLM oneshoted it in about 45min. The experiement with Opus is still running with checks.

The prompt was `Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC``

--

--

UPD. Lol. I pasted non-cyphered text

Qwen 3.7 max, gpt 5.6 sol, fable 5.1, gemini 3.8 flash decoded the message in one shot for me... There is nothing special about astra doing something here

I blantly threw request to decode the messaage in qwen 3.7. Used via api with couple simple generic system prompts like "be concise", nothing special. Prompted as

Decode

``` BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH ```

--- response (I trunkated the output to conclusion only)

"BITTE UM ANGABE DES MARSCHWEGES. BEFINDE MICH IN ROSENOW. SOFORT FUNKANTWORT. [UNCLEAR/END]" Translation: "Please provide the marching route. I am located in Rosenow. Immediate radio response required. [Unclear]"

---

sailingparrot 8 hours ago||
You are giving the already decoded message as input, it’s just short hand with one typo. It’s hilarious that you might think that for 80 years no one was able to figure out that BTTE was supposed to be BITTE
podgorniy 5 hours ago||
I wasn't thinking, just mechanically moving _what I though is the encrypted string_ into the LLMs context.

I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.

Perz1val 8 hours ago|||
You pasted in the decoded German and asked it to "decode" into English?
podgorniy 5 hours ago||
Yeah. I wasn't _consious enough_ at the moment. Second attempt, though, succeeded https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363
HDThoreaun 8 hours ago|||
I really, really would like to know what you were thinking when you pasted that "ciphertext" into the LLMs
podgorniy 5 hours ago||
I wasn't :D
redsocksfan45 8 hours ago||
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writtenone 10 hours ago|
I wouldn't be surprised if humans cracked it then OpenAI "bought" the solution and work to claim it was GPT's doing
john_strinlai 10 hours ago|
wild conspiracy given what else has come out of these companies.