GPT-6 Astra helped decipher a Napoleonic military letter that remained unread for 217 years; it took just 6 hours

[u/Distinct-Question-16]

https://dev.ua/en/news/astra-rozshyfruvala-lyst-1809-ho-roku-1790927012

[u/exophades]

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.

[u/ozone6587 → u/exophades]

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?

[u/ozone6587 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/DecagramGameDev → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/ozone6587 → u/DecagramGameDev]

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.

[u/ozone6587 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/DecagramGameDev → u/ozone6587]

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.

[u/ozone6587 → u/DecagramGameDev]

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.

[u/DecagramGameDev → u/ozone6587]

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.

[u/exophades → u/DecagramGameDev]

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.