Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results • Hacker News Board

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#51

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

ameliaquining wrote: post #31

dgellow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say that for any argument regarding consciousness, because we don’t have an actual, all encompassing definition of what consciousness is. In general I don’t think comparison with humans makes much sense, we should be able to discuss LLMs without always falling back to “but what about humans” (sorry for the caricature)

Shouldn't that imply that agnosticism is the proper view, rather than asserting that something is impossible on a next-token-predictor architecture? (Note: I don't actually think the consciousness question is the most important one in the near term. Where I think this line of reasoning gets really dangerous is when people use it to assert that LLMs can't or won't engage in certain behaviors no matter much they advanc…

If you believe that matrix multiplication with random sampling is conscious, then you probably believe everything is conscious, like rocks.

Most people would expect that matrix multiplication is not conscious, and autocomplete is not conscious either.

We can't prove matrix multiplication isn't conscious, but it doesn't seem likely unless everything is conscious.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#52

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #3

> They [anthropic] appear to have just told it to get some results and then strapped its nose to the grindstone until it found some. it is fun how well this works. i cant find the link immediately (will look and edit with it), but somewhere in the " hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx " thread, someone brought up a different conjecture breakthrough where the prompts were basically just repeated "no, ke…

Same with cybersec. They're finding bugs a human could've found if they looked hard but humans don't look hard at 100% of the code and the LLM can, at high speed.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#53

Post by notahacker » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

ameliaquining wrote: post #37

argee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. "Most" implies majority, and the majority of people are using these tools not for programming but in contexts where ontology is more relevant than capability (not that capability is irrelevant, but most people care, or are tricked into caring, far more about the former).

Sorry, what contexts are these?

I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend"

Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure.

(tbf I think the "glorified autocomplete" still works surprisingly well for programming outcomes too. Autocomplete [and fuzzy search of reference material] actually is useful and often right and certainly can save time even when it's only suggesting the rest of the variable name. But you might not want to commit everything it suggests...)

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#54

Post by jiggawatts » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #6

This is good: > If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that . The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. [...] > On the other hand : if y…

My mental model is this:

There is a vast ocean of human knowledge, far beyond the capacity of any human brain, even within specialised fields.

Books helped "plug the gaps" in our knowledge, increasing the scope that a single human mind can encompass.

Web search engines did the same thing, but more and faster.

LLMs are like search engines on steroids, essentially a research librarian that operates at 1,000x human speed and can "in context" locate relevant information, adapting it to fit the hole it needs to go into as well.

It feels less like discovering new theorems, but instead having direct access to all theorems, which is hugely valuable in itself.

I.e.: the recent counterexamples to open conjectures has largely been about the AIs "trawling through all the things" and scraping together every bit of human-generated knowledge ever produced that is relevant to the conjecture.

Conversely, in the past, we had to "make do" with sub-standard solutions where the problem had been solved, but finding every relevant solution in the ocean of knowledge was prohibitively time consuming.

In some sense, LLMs will "raise the floor" in what is considered the minimum level of quality of a solution, where even throwaway / toy designs will now start applying every bit of accumulated wisdom instead of just some of it.

We have mechanised attention.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#55

Post by Retr0id » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

free_bip wrote: post #9

simonw wrote: post #4

> both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model That sentence gives the impression that Mythos might be released in the future. That's clearly not going to happen - it's already "released" in as much as selected, trusted partners can access it, and the rest of us get it in the form of Fable - which is Mythos but with filters that downgrade you if you try to use it for anything even remotely r…

Genuine question here, why would you ask Fable to explain the difference between tusks and teeth? That's a task that can probably be handled by Haiku.

If you're paying a flat monthly rate, unused tokens are wasted tokens.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#56

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 11:58 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #53

ameliaquining wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what contexts are these?

I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend" Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure. (tbf I think the "glorified autocomp…

[deleted]

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#57

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #22

ameliaquining wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what are you hoping to convey by reminding people that LLMs are next-token predictors? They are, of course, but most people without an AI background won't fully understand what that means, so I assume you're using it at least partly as a proxy for something else.

I think understanding how this stuff works is really important. For technical people it gives them a useful starting point for understanding it all. For less technical people it's crucial to help them understand that it's not some weird new magical science-fiction AI - it's still computer programs that turn text into numbers and do stuff with the numbers and turn those back into text. It's harder to believe something…

> It's harder to believe something is conscious or threatening to achieve word domination once you understand that it's a machine that statistically figures out which word should come next.

At the risk of sounding overly flippant, all world domination has been achieved by some person(s) figuring out which word should come next. Words quite literally = action when it comes to LLM’s with tools access

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#58

Post by Groxx » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 12:17 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #14

dboreham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also getting irritated with the “glorified autocomplete” comments. Since nobody can post such comments and also use the tools I'm using, I'm wondering if the phenomenon is due to people only having experience with the free version of whatever it is they're trying to use?

The “glorified autocomplete” framing isn’t to take literally. It’s a way to remove the mystic and whole anthropomorphization of AI. It’s saying they aren’t sentient or entities we are interacting with, even if that’s how the output presents itself. Instead they are “just” stochastic models

I generally like it still. It describes their failure modes pretty well, and in a way that most people already recognize. They're incomparably more complex, of course, but they are not intelligent and they are very much repeating what they've seen without any capability for factual accuracy.

Practically every other attempt at describing them leans too technical and unfamiliar (stochastic parrot) or too anthropomorphic (even describing them as "not like a human" gets people thinking in terms of humans, like how if I mention that your tongue is in your mouth all the time, using up almost all of the room, feeling your teeth and tasting itself, you're now uncomfortably aware of it and the numerous bumps on the surface).

You need to work from a reference that has both a shared understanding, and does not lead to problematic "if X has Y, and Z is like X, then Z has Y" seemingly-logical derived beliefs. "Spicy autocomplete" is a fairly safe starting point in both ways.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#59

Post by svieira » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #53

ameliaquining wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what contexts are these?

I don't know about "most", but there are a lot of people treating it as somewhere between "magic oracle" and "new friend" Not to mention people more worried about whether the AI is motivated to hurt us than what human motivations can do with something that can autocomplete its way through every possible attack vector of cryptographic systems most of use would prefer remain secure. (tbf I think the "glorified autocomp…

My favorite analogy for LLMs is "an intellectual chain saw". It does one thing, well, but that isn't "cut wood". It's "cut". What it cuts will happily include limbs.

Re: Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

#60

Post by KPGv2 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #57

simonw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think understanding how this stuff works is really important. For technical people it gives them a useful starting point for understanding it all. For less technical people it's crucial to help them understand that it's not some weird new magical science-fiction AI - it's still computer programs that turn text into numbers and do stuff with the numbers and turn those back into text. It's harder to believe something…

> It's harder to believe something is conscious or threatening to achieve word domination once you understand that it's a machine that statistically figures out which word should come next. At the risk of sounding overly flippant, all world domination has been achieved by some person(s) figuring out which word should come next. Words quite literally = action when it comes to LLM’s with tools access

> At the risk of seeming X, statement that overwhelmingly demonstrates X-ness.

It's exhausting to even consider where to begin addressing the assertion that good leadership is just predicting the next word to say. Especially considering the corpus available to most great leaders in history was extremely small. To think Hannibal's military campaigns were just because he'd read like ten books in his life and could accurately forecast effective rhetoric is...indescribably divorced from reality.

At the risk of seeming like a jerk.