I guess this implies that non-Codex harnesses get a little bit worse? In wondering what's so special about their subagents system that they feel the need to hide these messages...
Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
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Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the reason I think. These black markets not only pool and resell subs, but also store data and sell to whoever is training. Encryption is useful to at least stop the latter. Ultimately same purpose as a\ ‘s trick exposed earlier, but a much nicer implementation.
> but also store data and sell to whoever is training I see this as an argument against using them/Chinese models all the time, but I don't get it. I totally understand wanting to keep your data private if you're using an LLM for personal chats. But coding? I'm not working for the military, I'd gladly donate my codebase to Chinese labs if that means they can keep releasing 6-months-behind level models for 100x cheape…
When you work on proprietary code with a lot of trade secrets contained in it, on a codebase that did cost millions of dollars of man-hours to build and that holds the company's IP, you tend to be very careful where you're sending that to.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#63“Starts”? How’s this not already a TLS connection?
The prompts are now encrypted, not just the transit connections...
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#64What's the idea here? Why does this seem important to OpenAI?
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#65I guess this implies that non-Codex harnesses get a little bit worse? In wondering what's so special about their subagents system that they feel the need to hide these messages...
Sol and Terra seems specifically post-trained to handle multi-agent orchestration, I'm guessing OpenAI feels like the trained data of when to do the spawning and what context to include for the new sub-agent is the magic in their new models, so that's what they're aiming to preserve. But, this is all a guess of course.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the reason I think. These black markets not only pool and resell subs, but also store data and sell to whoever is training. Encryption is useful to at least stop the latter. Ultimately same purpose as a\ ‘s trick exposed earlier, but a much nicer implementation.
> but also store data and sell to whoever is training I see this as an argument against using them/Chinese models all the time, but I don't get it. I totally understand wanting to keep your data private if you're using an LLM for personal chats. But coding? I'm not working for the military, I'd gladly donate my codebase to Chinese labs if that means they can keep releasing 6-months-behind level models for 100x cheape…
Some workplace code base are legally not supposed to be shared.
More importantly, they train on not only code but also your interactions with the model, no matter how little you value your labor, there are values in it.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#67I wonder if they are gonna stop us from using gpt subscriptions in alternative harnesses. If not - that doesn't matter much, codex cli is a remarkably unremarkable harness.
Codex CLI not having a rewind makes it useless to me.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#68Using ciphertext for inference would mean it's not a very secure ciphertext. These two ideas don't compute for me. Same thing with homomorphic encryption. I don't get it. If you can gain any knowledge from a ciphertext, you just found a way to exploit the ciphertext to me.
The idea of homomorphic encryption is to do things without the knowledge, and not gaining the knowledge. If ciphertext contains a number, and you don't need to know what number it does to always be able to multiply it by 2, you succeeded - as a simple example.
It still just sounds like fancy obfuscation to me. I've read alot of examples trying to understand but I can't get past that being able to run processes on ciphertext in a way you can learn something doesn't make sense without me changing my definition of what I think encryption means.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#69Then why to even keep codex open source?
It's to prevent collection of queries from users that are coming from resellers/proxies, for reasons of economy or bypassing region blocks etc. The users are using the stock client and may believe they are using direct OpenAI servers.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#70What's the idea here? Why does this seem important to OpenAI?
Seems fairly obvious what the point from OpenAI's side is (protect what they see as the moat, that a model is "good at spawning sub-agents"), but what's really strange to me is that the team somehow didn't manage to push back on this, it's so clearly disadvantageous to developers who are trying to rely on Codex for real work. For this we need introspection into what exactly is going on, hiding the prompts is just so backwards from what I expect from OpenAI.