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OpenAI is good at unminifying code

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Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#21

Post by smusamashah »

LLMS are trained to predict next text. But examples like these look like they have also 'learned patterns'. If rot13 is applied on this minified code, will LLM still find meaning in it? if it still could, its more than just next tokens. Need to try it.

edit: chatgpt found out that its rot13 and couldn't explain the code directly without deobfuscating it first.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#22

Post by ervinxie »

LLMs are very good at text reading. LLMs read tokenized text, while human use eyes to view words. Another scenario is that ChatGPT is good at analyzing cpp template error messages, which are usually long and hard to understand for human.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#23

Post by lifthrasiir »

JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers.

A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that are intentionally obfuscated in the past and ChatGPT couldn't understand them even at the surface level in my experience. For example, a gist for my 160-byte-long Brainfuck interpreter in C had some comment trying to use GPT-4 to explain the code [1], but the "clarified version" bore zero similarity with the original code...

[1] https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/596667#gistcomment-47512...

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#24

Post by PaulHoule »

j_maffe wrote: post #12

LLMs are excellent at text transformation. It's their core strength and I don't see it being used enough.

Particularly those that are basically linear, that don’t involve major changes in the order of things or a deep consideration of relationships between things.

They can’t sort a list but they can translate languages, for instance, given that a list sorted almost right is wrong but that we will often settle for an almost right translation.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#29

Post by xanderlewis »

j_maffe wrote: post #12

LLMs are excellent at text transformation. It's their core strength and I don't see it being used enough.

It’s not only their core strength — it’s what transformers were designed to do and, arguably, it’s all they can do. Any other supposed ability to reason or even retain knowledge (rather than simply regurgitate text without ‘understanding’ its intended meaning) is just a side effect of this superhuman ability.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#30

Post by Tiberium »

smusamashah wrote: post #21

LLMS are trained to predict next text. But examples like these look like they have also 'learned patterns'. If rot13 is applied on this minified code, will LLM still find meaning in it? if it still could, its more than just next tokens. Need to try it. edit: chatgpt found out that its rot13 and couldn't explain the code directly without deobfuscating it first.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet can natively speak double base64 encoded English. And I do mean it - you can double b64 encode something, send to it, and it'll respond as if it was normal English. Obviously base64 is a simpler transformation than rot13, but no GPT models can deal with double b64.
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