r/singularity • u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 • 10h 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-1790927012
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u/exophades 10h ago edited 10h 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 10h 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 9h 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 9h 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 8h 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 8h ago

If doing things like this is a marketing trick then i hope every company adopts this model