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OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
(cryptocellar.org)
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by sohkamyung
by sohkamyung
BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH
Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow.
After trying many different approaches, GPT–6
Astra focused on using the repeated place name
ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib.
(Is it possible that this is a misreported detail? It feels like a singular ROSENOW would be an equally effective crib)
> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message
It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.
In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.
It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
A sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")
It also makes sense that a longer crib
would generally be more effective than a
shorter one.
I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.
Edit: Found it from here: https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/
ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTCBreaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.
Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.
The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?
However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.
The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.(There's an interesting story on Operation North Pole, where Marks suspected that a Dutch resistance group had been overtaken by the SS, and it was actually the SS sending the encrypted messages: all the encryption and spelling was suddenly perfect)
Prompt
Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC`
Result
Raw Decryption (verbatim from the machine): BTTEUMANGABEDESMARSQWEGESXBEFINDEMIQINXROSENOWROSENOWXSOFORTFUNKANTWORTXWASCHBBSCH 2. Segmented German (with military telegraph conventions expanded): BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES . BEFINDE MIQ IN : ROSENOW ROSENOW . SOFORT FUNKANTWORT . WASCHBBSCH
(Standard German radio conventions: X represents punctuation/spacing; Q was frequently substituted for CH to prevent transmission ambiguities; BTTE was an enciphering operator typo for BITTE; WASCHBBSCH was an operator typo for the signature WASCHBUSCH).
3. Corrected German: „Bitte um Angabe des Marschweges. Befinde mich in Rosenow, Rosenow. Sofort Funkantwort. Waschbusch.“
4. English Translation: "Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch."
Cryptographic Verification Re-encrypting the plaintext using the identical key settings reproduces the exact ciphertext byte-for-byte:
Enigma ( M raw ) = ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC Enigma(M raw
)=ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC 19:10
I'd start by asking how much of that generated software is novel, or easily found on the web? Then, how much of the breaking process was offloaded to that software? If Astra is just handing off tasks to another computer, then I'm not sure how much credit it deserves. Finally, it looks like Astra provided some useful insights which narrowed down the search. Were these insights cribbed from elsewhere?
Stubborn for a long time because the message used a completely different key from the rest of that day's traffic. Everyone assumed it shared the daily key. The original transcription had errors. The left rotor turned over at letter 72, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks.
What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.
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> Despite the seeming difficulty in decrypting its messages, Enigma contained a number of design issues that left patterns in the cyphertext. Poland first cracked the machine as early as December 1932 and was able to read messages prior to and into the war. Poland's sharing of their achievements enabled the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence.
Ok interesting, so why do people talk about Turing in this connection then?
> Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine
Ok so Turing just improved an existing method. Without being an actual expert it's impossible to know how much credit he actually deserves.
Two more references: the Polish method was called "Bomba" [3] invented by Marian Rejewski [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
The YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos by David Oranchak, one of the people who solved the Z340 cypher, has some more details on this as well as how the Z340 cypher was cracked.
I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.
Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2
I'm personally not sure if it can come with original thinking and techniques to solve completely novel problems. For that, some imagination and thinking outside the box are required, and I doubt the current architecture can do any of this.
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GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
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Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.
This is not to say the reaction to "mythos is too dangerous" is unfounded but it missed the most imporant and obvious signal. This technology is drastically changing the world.
Isn’t it feasible that a given ciphertext could mean any number of different things under different settings? If so, we don’t know whether this setting happens to match a plausible plaintext or whether this really was the plaintext the sender intended to send.
It's military comms traffic from WW2, encrypted by machine named Enigma. Back in 1940's it was like breaking SSL today, with only difference that they actually could (kinda) break Enigma.
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Also: Why should we assume Terra, GLM or any other less SOTA and less expensive model wouldn't have been able to do the same?
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?
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The prompt was `Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC``
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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]"
---
-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
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.
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Is ClosedAI running out of money or what is going on?
5.6 Sol is much more capable.
I ONLY know this because https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk, btw.
Fascinating!
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Is there some temporary storage where you could pause and resume unlimited 44 second runs?
I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?
It seems like a lot of the recent "breakthroughs" come down to this: spending millions of dollars in compute to solve problems that essentially amount to recreational math problems
The ciphertext of message Nr 172 was:
MVUEH IDEVS ARMCC NQTAT YEVFC DBZGG SMXWL PSYWZ YTCBS WURRT BZCVG ODVJU SLSOO MJQJZ SXSEB ZPEYM DNXJF TC
Were operators of enigma machines aware enough of cryptology or the weaknesses of enigma, for that to have been done intentionally to prevent decryption? I doubt it, otherwise _many_ things should have been done _much_ differently by the operators.
https://www.maparchive.ru/nara-doc/Waffen-SS/3_SS_PANZER-DIV...
> Daily reports and sketches pertaining to offensive engagements across Lithuania in the Gvardeysk and Ukmerge areas, 22-28 Jun; advance across Latvia and offensive operations in the Deguciai, Daugavpils, Zidina, and Dagda areas, 28 Jun-4 Jul; and invasion of Russia and offensive and mopping-up operations in the Rasina (Rosenow), Opochka, Isaki, Zaborov'ye, and Gorki areas, 5-19 Jul 1941. Also periodic division circuit diagrams, 29 Jun-18 Jul 1941, and data on enemy operations.
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(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).
Aktuell means current. Not sure if a exact german translation exist for that word. Tatsächlich maybe
Putting "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" into google search returns the result from Gemini with similar explanation, which it references to a Yahoo article about the Astra breakthrough and that's a result as of 3 hours ago.
with search it found and referenced pages, including the hn ones. Without search it just described what one would need to descrypt (`To decrypt this ciphertext, the specific Enigma machine parameters are required:`) and the list.
Out of curiosity ran the same prompt against bunch of models - grok, kimi k3. They all say the same thing that they need model version, rotors and so on to descrypt.
When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.
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I read through some of the logs that antigravity gives. It produced intermediate results, scripts, calls, assumptions (about german language). I've shares random bits in comment below to give a taste of what it was doing.
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The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them
(Or did it look up the results on the web?)
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it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.
It ran bunch of various scrips like:
clang++ -g -fsanitize=address /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc -o /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg && echo "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" | /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg -u B -w 123 -r AAA -g ... -c -l /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/english
and
sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc
and
Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.
and
Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.
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I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)
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My point is that astra isn't special. This appears to be quite narrow, well-documented and explored task. The goal itself is approacheable by other LLMs and non-researches task.
It seems weird to me that a (relatively) straightforward workflow like that would elude crypto hobbyists for the last 21 years (since 2005 according to the article).
I think they did not have access to all pleora of enigma-related bits and pieces. Or there were not enough autistic ones. Or this one was simply overlooked in favour of more interesting one.
The whole trick is possible only because bunch of people whote bunch of text and code about the subject, well-documented it and made public. For LLM all these bits and pieces are very "close" and easy to pull together unlike for people who have to deal with each bit and decision and information.
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"On it's own" generally means "not steered" or otherwise given professional guidance or input.
I would say "developed the necessary software for a simulator" to be even more impressive - "here solve this problem" and "OK, but first I have to built the entire lab!"
My comment probably sounds facetious but I'm actually intrigued by why we seem to view using the level immediately underneath as cheating whereas the levels below that are taken for granted?
It can code enigma simulator from the algorithm. That's not really a problem. Astra will send computing to programs, LLMs are not good at computing themselves, why is this a big deal?
"Oh?! You harvested and ground the wheat? You extracted the sugar? You laid the eggs?"
Well were they? Short of you showing us the answer just sitting there or some tool that can already solve it I see no reason to believe this was the case. And the problem being out there unsolved for a long time implies it's not the case.
And that's taking your concern at face value. It just seems incredibly pedantic to say it didn't solve the problem by itself because it created it's own tools to help solve it. Beyond that we could also fault it for not creating the GPU's it's running on.
Turing and Flowers: "How do you think we did it?"
Also you appear to be using a computer to submit this comment rather than doing it manually, so can it really be said that you wrote it?
Why do we view using the level of abstraction immediately below as cheating while the levels below that are taken for granted?
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And then I come to hackernews and well, not quite, but I'm sure that one will be done shortly too.
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"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own."
"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
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awesome! keep going
great work! keep going
Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?
Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.
Not mention it also says this...
> We are still analysing the GPT–6 Astra logs to see exactly how it executed the break.
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For everything else, there’s Astracard
"After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr. 172, MVUEH and it also quickly suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX ..."
That's not correct for the content.
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
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Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.
There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done by machines. Or it may not.
But I don't think betting your ego on the idea that you will be useful in the loop for very long is very wise.
Compare with go (boardgame): Centaur go was basically not ever a thing.
Other applications behaved kinda similarly (AI Starcraft/Dota/...), where we had decent "human-like" heuristics from the get go and the Centaur concept could never really shine, much less for a decade or more.
I'd also like to stress that past progress in this mainly happened for the love of the game, while the (economical) incentives to replace human office workers are... high.
I do expect centaurs to outperform other systems for many types of tasks for years to come (and am kind of betting on this to keep getting paid).
But what I'm talking about is ego. It your ego is tied up with (a) your intelligence or (b) your ability to perform task X; you will probably be humbled this century.
What you describe doesn't actually sound to me like the worthy goal it might initially come across as. Struggle helps us feel alive.
Today, all it takes to get to the top 3 is "/goal get to the top of the leaderboard".
The human-in-the-loop is only a temporary measure until the models get good enough.
I found that Leffen even said the explanatory website took about 99 times more effort than the codebreaking itself. And he said that he set the direction and pushed, and the model did the execution. How much steering "pushed forward" involved is not disclosed anywhere, but in this instance, it seems to be more a case of "Human pointed at hard task and AI did an awesome job mostly by itself." Tho how much he was a simple meat-ralph-loop is not entirely clear.
Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better
Hearing a guy built his home in a week with the power of nails and a hammer would have been novel in era of mortise and tenon.
I actually found an article about raving about how fast nail production was thanks to machining advances in 1790 and that it would bring great value: https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...
It’s seems to me humans haven’t changed, just which machines we praise.
The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.
Don't people actually read anymore?
edit: I think that's going to be my go to on "you aren't an artist" from now on. "No! I'm an AI researcher!"
Classic XOR encryption is like this. You can make a given ciphertext decrypt to anything you want by XORing the ciphertext with the desired plaintext to get the key.
Therefore, just because you've found a way to decode something to plausible-looking text doesn't mean you've found the correct key.
https://forum.zodiackillerciphers.com/community/zodiac-ciphe...
Looks extremely unconvincing to me.
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John Henry.
There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.
Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.
Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".
There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...
But PROGRESS I tell you!
But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...
Even old Ned Ludd won't buy my buggy whips, best in the land they may be.
Well, let them have these. They'll play around with open problems which generate media hype and then they might run out and move on to something else, because "AI came up with a problem and solved it in 3 days" won't have the same effects as "AI solved a problem in 3 days that humans couldn't solve in 100 years".
P=NP has always been drastically over stated as it's "Importance". It pretty much only exists as "That small technical detail that people with no domain knowledge think is important because youtube videos always focus on the trivial, 101 level cool fact stuff". Math focused CS people of course would always love any proof, but most people expect already that P!=NP, and no proof of that would be very meaningful, as it basically would not change our understanding of anything in the domain currently. It would be nifty, but not earth shattering.
Also the problems LLMs are attacking are resulting in proofs that don't seem particularly enlightening, so that's unfortunate.
However, there's always the tiny tiny chance it is P=NP, and any proof of that, regardless of how insightful it would or would not be, would be worth going fucking insane over. Just knowing that would be meaningful on it's own, and give us limitless work to do, and puts lots of mathematicians in an awkward spot.
I would be considered an AI skeptic because I'm not currently sacrificing myself at the altar of LLM companies, but if LLMs solve P=NP in any direction and even uselessly so, I think that's a good excuse to take days off work and party!
AI probably don’t dream of electric sheep but then again we don’t know. Perhaps we can find it out.
Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.
Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.
/s
Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.
Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.
My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.
/snark
It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.
Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.
So not any different from right now.
>definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
[taps on forehead meme]
The whole of humanity can have it available, if there is a whole lot less humanity.
Way, way more concentration of wealth and power
The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.
a preprint just three weeks old with my question
what voodoo is this lol
maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.
but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?
or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)
(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)
But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same thing for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.
I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...
General relativity is harder, but Poincare was somewhat oriented in the right direction. Perhaps AI can discover the final step.
Quantum mechanics is harder. You need like 25 years and a few unintuitive leaps to discover it. I guess it's too hard for AI in 2026, but remember to check again in 2027.
To quote Einstein directly:
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Viereck (Interviewer): How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?
Einstein: Discussing intuition and his confidence in relativity, noting he was convinced the 1919 eclipse would confirm his hypothesis.
Viereck: Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?
Einstein: I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
-----
I think we need more breakthroughs to build AI that can "draw freely upon imagination" to quote Einstein describing his process.
That is just my guess.
Einstein was not some brain floating around in a vacuum deriving GR from the pure Platonic solids.
And this again because it's a solid argument and popular example of human ingenuity.
I expect that there is some relatively easy-to-state solution to this problem, but that it's different in form from what most existing proofs and tools yield. Perhaps if I dumped millions of dollars into it an agent might chance on the solution. Or perhaps my luck is such that my fun little problem is truly intractable...
It's a brilliant idea, of course. But being considered "impossible" means it was considered previously and decided to be impossible. No?
I mean, crpytographically, it's ultra-trivial. You "just" need to solve the logistical issues of (1) shortwave radio existing (2) figuring out how to make sure your field agents possess and are not caught with the disposable one-time codes. I am surprised anybody would consider that impossible.
(I hope I am not downplaying the brilliance of the one-time pad idea itself)
"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"
All the news from the CERN including the Higgs boson include under the hood those transformation or a slightly more modern variant.
The hard part is mixing General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
But I don't think this describes intentionally encoding a different message, rather that different messages are hypothetically possible based on different keys but only one is intentional.
It might be feasible to encode different messages using different ciphers, like one in the text, another using steganography on the decrypted text. IDK. I'm not a cryptographer.
It was harder to design Symmetric Encryption using e.g. AES-256 than to break it? As far as I know it's design is pretty straight-forward but there is no known way to break it even with all compute of the planet at your disposal (excluding trivial ways like exposing the key).
When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.
There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?
But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"
But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.
This gets interesting.
One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.
Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.
IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.
I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.
And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.
> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.
EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.
What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.
[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...
At best, dumb brute force computation power.
It is about as meaningful as news that a computer found the 10....0th digit of Pi.
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).
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.
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.
So like half of all useful human inventions are to you not interesting just because it happened by dumb luck?
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!"
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.
Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.
Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.
Using that reasoning, I am only thinking about whatever comes out of my mouth or gets typed on my keyboard, and nothing else. Ludicrous on its face.
I think they should now focus on robotics, so it can do my dishes while I work on fun math games.
why would they compete with Nvidia on that?
There’s this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.
There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.
There are many things I want to do - that would require me to hire a team of 50 people.
I don’t want to do that nor can I afford to. Can OAI focus on enabling me to do this? I don’t care about this other stuff.
Just like many things in life - if it doesn’t show up in the economy it’s irrelevant.
I think the publicity is a nice to have. They need models like this for in-house use.
Technically, this isn’t OpenAI directly.
I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.
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The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.
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%.
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.
His post is implying that you are in denial. AI is becoming smarter then you and you can't admit this to yourself.
^^ that is what he is saying. I'm not saying this, he's saying this. And you should probably think about whether what he said is true or false.
That’s why I’m trying to make a better shoelace but first I have to develop arithmetic and shoes.
> 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.
What you read:
> All science and research that relies on prior research is FAKE.
I'm not sure you'll have much success with your shoelaces given such poor reading comprehension, but good luck goofball.
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These models/agents are quite good at that type of thing, working through the tedious bits with available information and tools.
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One is humanist, the other is anti-human, (in the end goal at least).
Where do you see the commenter say this?
In their previous grandparent post. They do reserve a place for human value judgement, but I doubt even that remains if everything else has been automated. The machines will decide what we value. We already see that to some degree with algorithmic engagement and targeted advertisements.
This? Still? After everything?
Buddy, you're living in the future. In a science fiction novel. Please get used to it.
Unfortunately, there are enough people in the world who think that is the future everyone should live in and are actively working to bring it about.
And so, one must adapt. .
I find this suprising kinda. If I got a choice right now, there's a bunch of dystopian Scifi that I would instantly go for (out of sheer curiosity), e.g. the Murderbot universe.
Are there fantasy worlds that you would want to live in? I feel this is a bit of a suspect benchmark in the first place because books typically want some kind of tension/conflict which you won't get if everyone is just gratefully living their best life.
The novel title: "Don’t Build The Torment Nexus".
(Also, getting people to think about the future rather than the present is a classic con. Looking at an empty field: "can't you just see the potential here?")
Technically you built it yourself and the builder was just a minor collaborator?
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"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
I mean... I'm all for collaboration but I think this case is pretty clear, no?
We are fooling to me, there is no intelligence in these models, they just apply methods that were invented by humans without any consciousness on what they are doing.
At the margin the innovative human matters.
What that means for the rest of society is TBD.
Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.
It is not yet the same as C++ or Python, for two reasons:
1) Ambiguity is still the default. Formal languages force you to resolve it up front.
English lets you paper over it until the model or the compiler (the human) notices.
2) The "compiler" (the LLM) is statistical and non-deterministic. Same prompt, different day, different bugs. A real language has a spec.
The practical move is to treat English as a high-level specification language, keep the generated artifacts inspectable, and "still know enough of the lower layers to notice when the translation went wrong."^1
[1] This is the key that is where humans can still be necessary, or at least another pass through the LLMs to decide on the best path, in the compiled code. Compilers for other languages do the same C -> Binary, etc.
A conventional compiler is bound by an as-if rule. It can take many internal routes, but the observable behavior has to match the language spec. Same source, same defined semantics. If two gcc runs emit different binaries, the program is still supposed to compute the same answers on the same inputs. That is why people treat the source as the artifact and the binary as disposable.
An LLM compiling English has no as-if rule unless you add one. "Sort the users by last active" can become a stable sort, an unstable sort, a SQL order by, an in-memory timsort, or a query that drops people with null timestamps. All of those can look like success. They are different programs. The model is not optimizing under a spec. It is filling in the parts you did not write.
A human who can read the destination language still notices when the chosen path is the wrong program.
A second model pass can compare paths, but only if you give it a way to score them: tests, types, invariant
So the historical analogy still holds, with one correction. JavaScript and Python were dismissed for being too easy, but they already had grammars and evaluators. English is easier still, and the evaluator is a statistical translator that will invent a dialect if you let it. The practical move stays the same: treat English as the spec language, pin the generated artifacts behind tests, and keep enough fluency in the lower layer to see when the translation chose a different program than the one you meant. The human is not required because the computer is weak. The human is required because the source language still leaves room for more than one destination.
It's a machine - when we attribute it human concepts such as victory, mistakes, ethics, we also shift responsibility away from the operator and soon enough bad people will use it as an umbrella. The agent ate my homework! The agent bombed a school! Bad agent, no!
I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.
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Prob because their life sucks.
Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.
But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.
And used to build the LLMs of today. We'll see how that evolves once LLMs have to feed LLMs with their own "intellect".
I'm imagining that someone like you would have argued that animals weren't conscious, or couldn't communicate, back in the day, because humans were "special" that way.
P=NP, but the margin-right is too narrow. Use Claude Design to hack Figma so you can change the margin and see the whole proof.You do understand this is intentionally trained into recent models for marketing purposes? "Wow, it saved me months of work in a day! This is the most amazing technology ever!!!!"... is what it intends to evoke by underpromising and overdelivering. I routinely have it helpfully suggest it will take something like "three engineer-months" to do something I do by hand without any LLM assistance in a day. The estimates may be accurate if you have literally never touched a computer in your life before and are starting to learn from there.
Why?
> But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
It's unclear to me if this is the good scenario or bad scenario. This would be good in your view right? At least I hope you're right.
Because it is delusional. Having an intelligent machine doesn’t mean you can somehow mind control individuals.
And no, that would be pretty terrible. Why would that be good? The AI leadership is composed of anti-democratic, sociopathic, doomsday cultists who believe it makes sense to sacrifice the world economy and possibly mankind itself for a possible utopian future they developed based on their media illiterate reading of sci-fi. They are very likely the worst people who should ever be given power
Excluding advanced forms of psychological manipulation, sophisticated neurological drugs and neural simulation for moment.
Are you suggesting that it's physically impossible to create a device which could induce electromagnetic currents in the brain which could in-theory either effectively control, or greatly influence someone's decision making?
I understand it would be extremely hard for humans, but can you explain why you're so confident that this would be such a hard problem that even an ASI couldn't solve it?
But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801324 is obviously not one of them. There is a very natural and obvious interpretation of the post that has nothing to do with the motivations it's accused of having, and the only thing that results in seeing those motivations is prejudice. It's a single-sentence, top-level comment, written by someone who has been here since 2010 and isn't infamous enough for me to recognize the username.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...
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I'd be surprised if direct observation of parents etc. played much of a direct role in learning to walk. I would guess it more furnishes the child's imagination so it can simulate itself walking -- rather than the statistical AI approach of 'learning the distribution of walking patterns in visual sensation'.
The ability to simulate possible programs is one of the capacities which enable coping with novel circumstances. My guess is the child learns to walk by updating its simulation of what it needs to do in order to walk, by its attempts to walk.
This simulation<->sensory-motor-update loop is missing in LLMs, for example.
Crawling?
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Um, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we have bipedal robots that walk and run rather well now.
I think you mean general relativity, connecting quantum mechanics with special relativity is just QFT
this is not moving the goalposts, this is try to understand what this tech truly able and not able to do.
Reminds of what Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge..might be his deepest insight ever.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world,” means that facts alone only describe what currently exists, while imagination allows us to discover what is yet unproven or unbuilt"
This probably sums up the current AI limitation nicely.
There are many examples of would be crypto algorithms that died on the vine because an attack was found. It is often recommended for beginners to study breaking cryptographic algorithms long before they attempt to create them.
Whenever I hear "AI can never" I know I can disregard them as an unserious person when it comes to anything around AI, learning, or philosophy.
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.
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.
I think the quote above is best as written, with a big emphasis on the "if"
Complete this sentence: "You can solve world hunger by..."
Intelligence is required to finish sentences. It's not just a Markov chain.
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.
Right. Exactly. Which means there's something wrong with the solutions. Be it evil humans or apathy or whatnot. A real solution would actually fix the problem.
*This un actionable summary of existing discourse. The real world doesn’t produce traces or take HTTP requests.
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.
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English is not code just because a technology was developed that could make educated guesses based on being trained with other code that people have written as to what the code generated should look like.
Also, much of this reply looks LLM generated.
That's a lot of axes you're grinding simultaneously my friend
If you want to place a bet on it, we can do a $10,000 bet in escrow contingent on myself implementing a well-specified WASM engine from scratch on stream without LLM usage in a month. I would love an opportunity to demonstrate how wrong you are. That said, rather than taking your money, I could also just share a streamer's content with you[1]. He implemented 3D web rendering with no dependencies in a 20 minute lecture, and it would take 10 minutes if you were seriously focused on doing it quickly. Sure, it was rudimentary pure JS rather than WASM, but really consider whether you think this 10 minute exercise couldn't be done in a language that compiles to WASM with 160 hours, while including the other hardware/OS-layer abstractions aforementioned. On the other hand, please do take me up on my offer. You said it's a 0% chance, after all -- surely you don't want to pass up on the easiest $10,000 of your life...?
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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.
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.
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.
I really don't want anyone to take anything I say at face value. What I want is for people to generally be more logical and think things through on their own, particularly things in which there's at least potential danger. And sad to say I've instead been seeing a lot of kool aid drinking, even around here.
I'm wondering if you can name anything that counts as a "creation" under your definition?
I'd rather get specific than talk about hypotheticals.