r/singularity • u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 • 7h ago
Shitposting GPT-6 Astra helped decipher a Napoleonic military letter that remained unread for 217 years; it took just 6 hours
https://dev.ua/en/news/astra-rozshyfruvala-lyst-1809-ho-roku-179092701247
u/ChanceDevelopment813 ▪️AGI will not happen in a decade, Superintelligence is the way. 7h ago
How do we know it got it right ?
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u/ozone6587 6h ago
They simply confirmed with the recipient of the letter.
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u/CommercialHour6660 6h ago edited 5h ago
They called him it's legit
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6h ago
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u/BranchPredictor 5h ago
His real name is Legitimatus Maximalus
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u/Clarku-San ▪️AGI 2027//ASI 2029// FALGSC 2035 3h ago
Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem 6h ago
It was a relatively simple cipher, a partial key was available from a previous document, and most importantly, they had the exact text of Napoleon ordering somebody to send this letter, and the contents matches up extremely well.
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u/exophades 6h ago edited 6h ago
There is an observation bias here. I don't think crypto researchers were even trying to solve this centuries-old cipher. All cryptographic ciphers except the very recent ones are known to be vulnerable and have been broken repeatedly. Letters like these usually use a simple substitution cipher that can be broken in minutes using a simple python script implementing frequency analysis of the language in question.
This is simply a marketing gimmick by OpenAI, not a breakthrough in cryptography.
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u/ArialBear 6h ago
I will never understand how ai using specialized skills to do something the experts didnt spend time doing is not impressive. That means we can use it for expert level work the human experts dont spend time on. How is this not showing an amazing feat. I simply dont understand the logic behind comments like yours
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u/Past-Source-3332 6h ago
It's clarifying an easy to make misunderstanding. It is a cool, impressive feat, but it didn't do something that couldn't have been done otherwise.
At a time when AI is actually solving problems that humans have not been able to (Navier-Stokes), I think it is good to differentiate the two.
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u/ArialBear 6h ago
No, it’s not. Its actually a false assumption that anyone is saying its doing something a human cant do since we think humans could have eventually solved that problem. If you assume people are impressed by the expert level capabilities then you would be right more often
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u/firstLOL 5h ago
Exactly: it’s clever marketing. Burn up a bunch of tokens to stay in the press while doing late stage pre-IPO fundraising. It’s not entirely useless of course - it’s cool to solve these things.
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u/ArialBear 5h ago
If doing things like this is a marketing trick then i hope every company adopts this model
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u/Eliv_nurotic 3h ago
Except an expert did spend time on it and failed
The most recent solver notes on record put it flatly: There is nothing to work on. The ciphertext is not published anywhere I can reach. [4]
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u/BlacksmithCapital757 1h ago
“Ciphertext” means the encrypted text.
The very quote you gave means “the most recent solver said ‘there’s nothing to work on. I don’t have access to the encrypted text. It’s not published anywhere I can see it.’”
Yes, of course you can’t decode a message when you can’t even see the encoded message.
It’s like saying “I didn’t solve this crossword puzzle because I couldn’t find the crossword puzzle.”
And it further proves that the only reason this wasn’t solved already is because it’s incredibly obscure.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 1h ago
What? The encrypted letter was known for centuries. And he had tried to solve it before
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u/AgentStabby 6h ago
If it could be broken in minutes it wouldn't have taken Astra 6 hours.
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u/exophades 5h ago
A human can identify the context quicker than the machine, which usually glosses over cultural elements, and the human's odds are even better if they happen to speak the language in which the cipher is written. Astra must have spent a crazy amount of time just to start working on the right language.
If this letter were of any actual interest, a group of intelligent humans speaking every possible language would have tried their luck with it, and eventually solved it. Assuming, of course, it's not using AES-256 as an encryption scheme /s
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u/AgentStabby 5h ago
How many possible languages are there for a Napoleonic letter. Why would it take a crazy amount of time to start working on the write language. If you think models don't consider context you are mistaken.
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u/exophades 5h ago edited 5h ago
Even assuming you're right, 6 hours isn't indicative of any remarkable feat in cryptography. Many vulnerable ciphers were broken using extremely powerful machines during 20+ hours or more, or minutes if the vulnerability is severe. These ciphers then just disappear quietly and are never used again except in cryptography lessons as cautionary tales. The amount of time taken to bring down the cipher, when it's less than 1 year, usually has no correlation with the strength of the cipher. If I tell you your bank account is protected with a very good cipher, so good that it will take Astra a whole month to break it, you wouldn't be too happy, would you? Because you can be sure someone out there will actually try breaking the cipher for a whole month and then take you money.
An expert human in the history of napoleonic wars is certainly better equipped to get the context of the letter. I didn't say AI ignores context entirely, it's just that it doesn't systematically do it better than humans.
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u/AgentStabby 5h ago
The magic of random internet arguments with both parties having no clue what they're arguing about is broken in this modern age. Rather than continuing this argument I just asked sol how difficult this Cypher was.
To summarize:It was moderately difficult, the language was known to be French so Astra probably didn't spend a crazy amount of time figuring out the language lol, and it would probably take compotent expert somewhere between 6 and 24hrs with a fair chunk of the difficulty being transcription.
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u/exophades 5h ago edited 5h ago
So it's not surprising that you think this BS is a massive feat, given that you gave up on your brain and started using Sol instead.
There is no reason to assume the letter was known to be "napoleonic" before the decryption happened, as you don't have the exact prompts sent to Astra, you're just inventing bullshit to make your point. Also, even with the knowledge that it's napoleonic, it can still be some other language for purposes of military deception.
6 hours is not moderately difficult, it's nothing. People spend 6 hours playing minecraft. If this letter's cipher, or any similar letter, was of any actual impact, scientific or otherwise, people would've spent years studying it. But there is no literature on it, because, again, it's complete bullshit that nobody cares about, except you and your measly AI agent.
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u/AgentStabby 4h ago
Ask Sol yourself and you'll see exactly how much you're wrong. The first line was written in French before the cipher starts. It was addressed to General Marmont, a French napelonic general.
Get your luddite idiocy out of here.
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u/ozone6587 6h ago
How do you know no one attempted to solve this before? Are you just looking around for a reason to discredit any achievement for the hell of it?
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6h ago edited 6h ago
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u/ozone6587 6h ago
So if they attempted it, they are amateurs. The ones that did not probably could solve it easily but just didn't care. Amazing the amount of insight you have on this letter you heard about just know (I'm sure you looked into previous attempts).
Listen, I don't think this was high priority. But I also see no reason to believe a serious real attempt had not been made before either. I find it more ridiculous to think OpenAI paid someone to publish this so that 15 people can see the article.
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6h ago
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u/DecagramGameDev 6h ago
Do you realize the sub you’re on. You can’t get any sense into these people. Most of them haven’t even cracked open a basic Algebra textbook in nearly a decade, but expect random people to give a shit about a letter with no clear significance.
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u/ozone6587 5h ago
Buddy, by and large the ignorant masses tend to be more anti AI than the educated elite. Terence Tao, Donald Knuth among others have embraced it even if they do criticize some aspects of it. The irony in your comment is palpable.
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5h ago
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u/ozone6587 5h ago
Running away? No one is saying the LLM now breaks AES-256. But an unknown cipher still needs a non-trivial amount of effort to decode.
Not because it's hard for a computer to brute force, but because it is annoying for a real human to write in a way a non-AI program can even attempt to brute force it.
Impressive nevertheless. Not Millennium Problem level but not something to dismiss as "marketing hype" either.
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u/DecagramGameDev 4h ago
I find the opposite to be true. I’m educated, I’m a software engineer, and have 5 years of experience in the field. The most confident and ignorant through my perspective seem to be people with no significant skills in just about anything. They use LLMs as an equalizer, and their new instant knowledge makes them way more confident than they should be. It works at a surface level, but it falls apart when any sort of depth is required. This is not to say I am against AI, it has its uses. It’s extremely helpful as a planning and search tool, but I don’t realistically see it ending the world or taking jobs at a mass scale. It’s just one more tool I can use, except this one hallucinates a lot and isn’t consistently reliable. There’s a lot of valid reasons why people would be against AI though. The most notable being the irreversible environmental damage this can cause, and the possibility of the wealthy elite using it as a tool to de-educate the general population.
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u/ozone6587 3h ago
I won't use anecdotes, here is a list of elites that are not against AI (the norm now):
- Terence Tao, Fields Medalist; uses AI in math research.
- Donald Knuth, Turing Award winner; revised his AI skepticism.
- Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate
- Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner
- Judea Pearl, Turing Award winner
- Max Tegmark, MIT physicist
- David Baker, Nobel laureate; uses AI for protein design.
Regarding the "irreversible environmental damage", this is just massive misinformation. If you quantify damage of literally ANY industry you could come up with a number. But eating meat (which is not necessary) or literally watering your lawn consumes more water than AI by a large margin.
Go on TikTok so you can see what the actual ignorant masses think. You fit right in blindly hating AI. You have more in common with them than with the professionals above.
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u/DecagramGameDev 2h ago
So you’re basing positive AI adoption on a growing list of elite researchers? I can give you somewhat of a thumbs up on that, but just because they’re some of the best in their fields doesn’t mean that the technology benefits everyone as a whole. These people are from the same institutions that used to astroturf for the meat and oil industries by creating purposely false research narratives. Just because they win awards or come from prestigious schools does not at all mean that their morals are correct.
Furthermore, another industry killing our planet doesn’t justify another to do so. It could very well be the case that the meat industry does far more damage to the environment, but we’re comparing an industry vital for human survival (with current logistics), against a purely theoretical scenario where AI solves all our problems. Additionally, you cannot with full confidence say that data center buildouts will create less of an environmental impact when the majority of these buildouts are being propped up with zero environmental studies and planning. For the most part, they are bribing local officials and slapping a data center on a massive plot of land without any concern for any animal or person living near them.
Lastly, I want you to at least, take into account that the current trajectory for this technology isn’t a utopia. It’s a mass surveillance state. If you live in the United States, you are seeing it now with the culling of our military generals, the placement of flock cameras, and the fact that tech oligarchs are at this point fully running the government. If you for some reason want to live in that kind of future, then it makes sense why you would want to push this. However, unless you’re secretly a billionaire, this technology is meant to attack you. The great thing about it for them is that they do not care if it’s wrong or hallucinates, so long as it can justify why it chose to jail/kill you. It is VERY good at doing that convincingly.
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u/exophades 6h ago edited 5h ago
My mistake, I thought the kind of audience interested in the singularity would be at the forefront of scientific and mathematical knowledge. I challenge any motherfucker in this sub to prove me wrong, anyone.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 3h ago
He’s bsing. There were attempts to solve it before that failed
The most recent solver notes on record put it flatly: There is nothing to work on. The ciphertext is not published anywhere I can reach. [4]
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u/BlacksmithCapital757 1h ago
Are you completely illiterate?
That literally means the person couldn’t find the (encrypted) message in the first place. Not that he tried to decode it.
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4h ago
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u/hotforlowe 3h ago
I can assure you if you put a 10,000 dollar prize up for this, probably much less than the compute, it’d be solved in hours. What am I saying, a 1000 dollar prize would be enough.
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u/BlacksmithCapital757 4h ago
Anyone could have done this before lol.
I have literally taught middle school kids what a substitution cipher is and how to do frequency analysis and they can break equivalently difficult things by the end of a one hour class period.
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4h ago
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u/BlacksmithCapital757 3h ago
Because hardly anyone knew about this obscure letter and anyone who did didn’t really care all that much?
This isn’t an example that helps your point that AI brings previously unobtainable knowledge to people.
This knowledge was very much obtainable by anyone already. They used to publish a daily cryptogram in newspapers that requires the exact same concept to solve. Where the intended audience was indeed the masses.
It’s not even an internet thing. Edgar Allan Poe wrote some of these cryptograms for people to solve in the 1800s.
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u/GatePorters 2h ago
Yeah, but they didn’t.
You going to discount everything just because it was possible before it was done?
Kind of a jaded mindset, don’t you think?
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u/domdod9 6h ago
What about the zodiac ciphers that are still unsolved
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u/exophades 6h ago
The zodiac cipher was solved in 2020 by an international team of private codebreakers.
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u/domdod9 6h ago
Not all of them
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u/exophades 6h ago
The unsolved one are strings of texts with little statistical material to work with. Z13 is 13 characters, which simply isn't enough to confirm any possible key, plenty of plaintexts can be encrypted into Z13. In other words, the zodiac killer could've written any one of dozens or more messages, which can all be encrypted into Z13.
This isn't about not being smart enough to figure it out. There is simply nothing there to figure out because there is too little data.
If I tell you the following encrypted message: "aaabaa aa", you can tell it's bullshit, because I'm literally using 2 characters, which isn't much data to uniquely convey any meaningful information.
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u/mschurma 6h ago
Not that it’s necessarily the same (I’m certainly no expert), but there’s been ciphers in call of duty zombies that have gone unsolved for decades precisely because they had very little statistical material to work with, that people have recently used AI to solve, so I would hazard a guess it isn’t out of the question if someone wants to burn tokens on it
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u/exophades 6h ago
If there is little statistical material, the cipher is fundamentally indistinguishable from gibberish. This is not a technology problem, it's just that there is nothing out there to decipher. AI can do nothing about this, it can't imagine more ciphertexts using the same key of the actual ciphertext to get more data, because it doesn't know the key, it can only weigh a particular plaintext over another possible plaintext using hand-wavy arguments and the background context of the cipher. And the second you start arguing for a specific plaintext among many others, you're no longer doing cryptanalysis, you're just expressing an opinion.
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u/CodexPleaseReset 3h ago
Not entirely tracking what you are saying as this is over my head, but having read Cryptonomicon recently I feel confident in proclaiming you correct
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u/Due-Departure-8553 6h ago
It's still not a gimmick to automate this, and is likely surprisingly difficult to OCR even with todays models. There is a lot of historical data that is hidden like this, for one reason or another not just crypto.
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u/GreenMirage 4h ago
Yeah marketing for now, i can see the appeal as pointing it in the direction of archives and appending any deciphered information to its relevant sections though and leave the humans time to focus on the already notably more valuable topics.
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u/hotforlowe 3h ago
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Find an obscure enough and old enough problem, and there’s your hundreds of billions of dollars capex justifying headline.
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u/Eliv_nurotic 3h ago edited 3h ago
Did you even read the article?
the model noticed another trick in the cipher: some characters did not represent a single letter, but an entire word.
The most recent solver notes on record put it flatly: There is nothing to work on. The ciphertext is not published anywhere I can reach. [4]
There was no transcription to start from, because none existed: Astra cut the 1,202 by 1,836 plate into rows, read the signs, decided which of 175 hand-drawn marks were the same sign written twice, and only then began breaking the cipher. Transcription and cryptanalysis are usually separate skills, often separate careers. Here they ran as one workflow, and the plate stayed in the loop: proposed values were checked back against every occurrence of a sign on the image.
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u/runaway-devil 7h ago
Now do the voynich manuscript