261–270 of 569 posts
> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas. Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbo…
The entire point of having multiple ciphers is that some will break. Did the world end with any previous one breaking? It’s incredible and awesome if AES GCM has a flaw found with an AI now, Chacha20 could be a direct or nearly-direct replacement. The sooner a cipher breaks, the better.
I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algorithms equally as fast, but how do you trust that they are resilient (or even just implemented correctly) without an extended vetting period?
In some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn. In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve,…
Sometimes it hits all three. >It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. The game I wrote manually hits 0/3.
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"Caveats, stated plainly" You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago. Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication…
It's a shame that I have to run a local model to decipher Opus, but them "dumber" models read far more naturally - https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english
A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't…
The answer the tool gives has never been the real reward. The real reward is the path taken through a complex landscape to get to Maxwells Equations for example. At the end of that story what we get is not just the equation but a map of the landscape explored. That map has larger influence and value than the equations or answers themselves. Because all future exploration find it super useful.
People are just learning they can start asking for maps rather than answers.
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Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very…
> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change] We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.
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This is one of the best conspiracies I've ever heard...
"Conspiracy" requires an unlawful or wrongful purpose. Please assume that the op was run from a jurisdiction where using a pseudonym on the internet was not illegal, and various sorts of influencer and meme marketing were well-accepted practices. Really, compared to an animated tiger telling kids that sugar-laden Frosted Flakes(tm) are "Great!", Task Peppermint was positively benevolent.
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I'm guessing it's because the way the first one was written looks real smart and sophisticated, which I'm presuming the models are rewarded for, especially when they're fed all kinds of PhD papers and so on as high quality, high weight data
Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’t know. If the use of jargon was complete cruft, I would expect it to be selected against during reinforcement learning
In other words, it ain’t you. It’s the model. It’s just genuinely bad.
Then you switch to ChatGPTs lineup and realize how things can actually be better. It took about a week to really get the feel for how to use their models… then I basically switched. I’ll check in every now and then when they actually make a deal about how opus “now makes sense”.
But honestly I’m half convinced Anthropic actually prefers the output of opus 5. I dunno why, but how else could you explain how such a thing got shipped? I mean somebody in the pipeline had to say “dude this model doesn’t make sense, you think we should fix it?” Right? Like it’s a pretty massive drop in quality for such a major brand in this space, you know? How did it make it out the door?!?
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Sometimes when I get frustrated reading Opus/Fable 5+ output I pause my rage out briefly to wonder if it's because I'm just too dumb for the model or if the model is just terrible at English. I'm not sure that telling it to "try explaining that again, simply and briefly" is helping my ego.
It's often simply misleading / bad writing. Here's one I just got about some crashes: "If the crashes stop, the factory overclock is marginal; run a small negative offset." This looks like it's saying: "If the crashes stop then we know the factory overclock is marginal." (This makes no sense.) What it's trying to say is: "If the crashes stop then we can run a small negative offset, because the factory overlock is mar…
"If the crashes stop, (that means) the factory overclock is marginal; (so) run a small negative offset. (to confirm this hypothesis)"
The core thought is basically avoid crashes -> caused by marginal overclock -> apply small -offset to test. Which is exactly the order the sentence is in :P