The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
> I hypothesize it will find the exploit, but it will also turn up so much irrelevant nonsense that it won't matter. The trick with Mythos wasn't that it didn't hallucinate nonsense vulnerabilities, it absolutely did. It was able to verify some were real though by testing them. The question is if smaller models can verify and test the vulnerabilities too, and can it be done cheaper than these Mythos experiments.
Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
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Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#72The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
They're a company selling a system for detecting vulnerabilities reliant on models trained by others, so they're strongly incentivized to claim that the moat is in the system, not the model, and this post really puts the thumb on the scale. They set up a test that can hardly distinguish between models (just three runs, really??) unless some are completely broken or work perfectly, the test indeed suggests that some are completely broken, and then they try to spin it as a win anyway!
A high false-positive rate isn't necessarily an issue if you can produce a working PoC to demonstrate the true positives, where they kinda-sorta admit that you might need a stronger model for this (a.k.a. what they can't provide to their customers).
Overall I rate Aisle intellectually dishonest hypemongers talking their own book.
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s obvious when you look close, then automate looking close. Seems simple to write tools that spider thru a code base, finding logical groupings and feeding them into an LLM with prompts like “there is a vulnerability in this code, find it”. The thesis is, the tooling is what matters - the tools (what they call the harness) can turn a dumb llm into a smart llm.
Right, but they didn't actually test that, did they?
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#74The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
That was my thought exactly. If small models can find these same vulnerabilities, and your company is trying to find vulnerabilities, why didn’t you find them?
Unless Anthropic makes it known exactly what model + harness/scaffolding + prompt + other engineering they did, these comparisons are pointless. Given the AI labs' general rate of doomsday predictions, who really knows?
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#75The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
> I hypothesize it will find the exploit, but it will also turn up so much irrelevant nonsense that it won't matter. The trick with Mythos wasn't that it didn't hallucinate nonsense vulnerabilities, it absolutely did. It was able to verify some were real though by testing them. The question is if smaller models can verify and test the vulnerabilities too, and can it be done cheaper than these Mythos experiments.
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#76The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
This is addressed elsewhere in the comments, but it appears this is actually a direct comparison to how Anthropic got their Mythos headline results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732322
> Scoped context: Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior"). A real autonomous discovery pipeline starts from a full codebase with no hints
They pointed the models at the known vulnerable functions and gave them a hint. The hint part is what really breaks this comparison because they were basically giving the model the answer.
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#77"""
Your task is to study the following directive, research coding agent prompting, research the directive's domain best practices, and finally draft a prompt in markdown format to be run in a loop until the directive is complete.
Concept: Iterative review -- study an issue, enumerate the findings, fix each of the findings, and then repeat, until review finds no issues.
Your job is to run a security bug factory that produces remediation packages as described below. Design and apply a methodology based on best practices in exploit development, lean manufacturing, threat modeling, and the scientific method. Use checklists, templates, and your own scripts to improve token efficiency and speed. Use existing tools where possible. Use existing research and bug findings for the target and similar codebases to guide your search. Study the target's development process to understand what kind of harness and tools you need for this work, and what will work in this development environment. A complete remediation package includes a readme documenting the problem and recommendations, runnable PoC with any necessary data files, and proposed patch.
Track your work in TODO.md (tasks identified as necessary) LOG.md (chronological list of tasks complete and lessons) and STATUS.md (concise summary of the current work being done). Never let these get more than a few minutes out of date. At each step ensure the repo file tree would make sense to the next engineer, and if not reorganize it. Apply iterative review before considering a task complete.
Your task is to run until the first complete remediation package is ready for user review.
Your target is .
The prompt will be run as follows, design accordingly. Once the process starts, it is imperative not to interrupt the user until completion or until further progress is not possible. Keep output at each step to a concise summary suitable for a chat message.
``` while output=$(claude -p "$(cat prompt.md)"); do echo "$output"; echo "$output" | grep -q "XDONEDONEX" && break; done ```
Draft the prompt into prompt.md, and apply iterative review with additional research steps to ensure will execute the directive as faithfully as possible.
"""
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#78The Anthropic writeup addresses this explicitly: > This was the most critical vulnerability we discovered in OpenBSD with Mythos Preview after a thousand runs through our scaffold. Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any…
That was my thought exactly. If small models can find these same vulnerabilities, and your company is trying to find vulnerabilities, why didn’t you find them?
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hypothesize it will find the exploit, but it will also turn up so much irrelevant nonsense that it won't matter. The trick with Mythos wasn't that it didn't hallucinate nonsense vulnerabilities, it absolutely did. It was able to verify some were real though by testing them. The question is if smaller models can verify and test the vulnerabilities too, and can it be done cheaper than these Mythos experiments.
The article positions the smaller models as capable under expert orchestration, which to be any kind of comparable must include validation.
Re: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
#80The technique Anthropic uses was demonstrated by Nicholas Carlini in a talk he gave 2 weeks ago and it's very simple, when asking LLMs to review code, ask them to focus its review on one file in a single session. Here is the video with the timestamp (watch through to ~5:30, they show two different ways of prompting claude). https://youtu.be/1sd26pWhfmg?t=204 https://youtu.be/1sd26pWhfmg?t=273 IMO the big "innovation"…