OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

Slopped up site https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/ seems to indicate it's due to:

  The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.

I believe Germans spell it achtually.

i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it

So the LLM would have done all of this on its own? Why is it ok to acknowledge the human was needed but it’s not a collaboration? Is there a defined percentage of ownership required to make the word collaboration valid?

I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.

Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.

But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...

That won’t happen. But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.

But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

I don't know..I doubt for example it can come up with special relatively if it has knowledge up until 1905.

But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same things for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.

I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...

A child walking for the first time. Novelty is easiest agent-relative. A problem is novel for an agent if there is no prior experiences of techniques which work to solve it.

"Find a way to connect quantum maths with special relativity maths Waves hands, and make no mistakes"

"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"

Well it's an old one at this point, but the story around the invention of the 1-time pad is pretty interesting. Long story short, a new engineer who didn't know the problem was considered "impossible" was tasked with sorting it out, and he did. I'm sure I left out a lot of details.

Anything that an ai can do is not novel /s

“This stele intentionally left blank”

But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed

It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No

When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.

I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result. That’s how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then it’s a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe

They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.

In math a lot of the spectacular results have been made by finding a counterexample or worming their way toward a proof that is very well defined.

There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?

But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"

But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.

This gets interesting.

>I think they should now focus on robotics

why would they compete with Nvidia on that?

It seems like OpenAI's takeaway after Sora is to not stretch themselves thin and focus on what's important.

Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.

Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.

Like what?

> Why do you think this uncracked code was so simple to solve?

I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.

> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.

I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.

EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.

This dichotomy is counter-productive. The valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction. At the same time, this stuff is clearly going to change how to world works in countless, deep ways. But the idea that some fancy autocomplete can replace humans ignores the reality of humanity and the fancy autocomplete.

It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.

Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.

It can be AGI and still be a bubble?

The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.

Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.

the opposite is also true

Is it? Personally I only found the story interesting because of the contents of the message, not because GPT-6 Math Scoopa was the one to stand on everyone else's shoulders and get its grubby little fingers into the cookie jar. Computer does thing that computers should ostensibly be good at is a middling goalpost – what's more intriguing is the implication that the model might have stolen private info or scooped someone else to get there once again.

Yea, it's kind of odd how "sour grapes" people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was.

Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".

>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"

A person inventing something out of dumb luck is interesting.

A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.

The reason these are unsolved is because no-one was working on them.

Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!