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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

So it’s pretty clear that Anthropic is privately trying to break cryptography.

I see it as: they're all trying really hard problems that aren't in the training data, to gauge if their models are improving, achieved by looking at problem that humans haven't been able to solve yet. The evidence to this is all the problems being publicized in the last few weeks.

Or, less favourably: they are burning a ton of tokens on any random "hard" tasks they can think of to try and generate stories about AI doing amazing things to pump the hype, infinite monkeys theorem as a playbook. You only advertise the ones you succeed on, thus pushing the idea that's what they do routinely. Stochastic "genius".

Whether by brute force or by way of clever tricks, the fact that they reverse engineered the source of these curves is impressive.

If these arguably very finite amount of monkeys allow them to pull off such campaigns so frequently and consistently, these monkeys kinda do got it going on.

Finite doesn't mean small. We have no idea how much they are burning in the back to do this. If you are taking things people just don't care about enough to invest the necessary effort/money to solve, and spend way more than anyone else is willing to spend to solve them, the solution could be less AI and more access to lots of investor money you can burn on PR.

The real question is "how much would it cost me to solve a similarly hard problem?" which is impossible to answer without them giving the detail on how many of these projects they are running and how many tokens they are burning, something they don't tell us.

I have considered this angle before, but landed on that it's not like anyone was ever actually going to do so.

I tend to think of the market kind of like a social media feed, i.e. engagement matters. Even if they're establishing these results at an overhead, they're doing so with money that otherwise would probably never be spent on these problems, or would only be over very long timeframes.

Whether this is sustainable is where what you describe comes in. And it may not be, but that doesn't mean it isn't impressive. Lots of cool technologies in history that failed to justify their stay.

It makes a big difference to if you view LLMs as a tool that's going to do all the things the CEOs are claiming, or a tool that's in the middle of a bubble and is going to end up being a lot less than they claim (which can still be a useful tool, to be clear, they are claiming a lot).

You are right that there is nothing wrong with, e.g: Red Bull sponsoring an extreme athlete to do some crazy sport that was otherwise never going to get funding. It's true that otherwise they were never going to get funding for it, but it's advertising for Red Bull and something cool for people doing something interesting, win-win.

I think the difference is that Red Bull have a very strong income stream that funds it. Currently all these AI companies are burning investor money, and to me, that looks less like "savvy advertising" and more like "pumping the bubble".

They're building hype around their product by solving genuinely hard problems? To quote xkcd[1]: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

[1] https://xkcd.com/810/

The less favorable interpretation is not "genuinely hard".

How is that a logic interpretation? They're problems humans couldn't solve. That makes them hard, by definition.

They are problems humans couldn't solve given the level of interest and investment they had. You can believe the LLMs made it viable to solve them cheaply, that's the narrative they are selling, but I think it is not unreasonable to point out the companies are willing to burn way more money than the problems have been considered "worth" historically solving them to advertise their LLMs.

One of the headlines was applying an already-known enigma machine algorithm to a single message nobody had figured out the key for. Neat result, but could have been solved by a focused human without much effort.

True, that was one of the headlines. Now, how about all the rest [1]?

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openais-math-dump-rattles-ma...

Have you noticed "infinity" in the "infinite monkey theorem"? Combined with a combinatorial explosion this means no practical usage.

This effort is relevant to "breaking cryptography" about as much as publishing the script for a 40 years old movie would break the film industry.

They are throwing Claude at questions around cryptography.

If it was insecure and they found it first, that'd be better than many alternative actors who would eventually find the same exploit.

We should be certain that the crypto algos we use are secure. It would be a great use of their resources to try to break crypto.

Yes, boil the seas so we can confirm our cyber funny-money is still funny.

Owning all cryptocurrency, and really all financial transactions over the internet, might briefly justify the Anthropic valuation

Yeah, happy to see. Wouldn't it be cool if the many computational hardness assumptions were no longer just assumptions? If the algorithms and implementations used would no longer require the holy blessings of arbitrary - if credentialed - researchers?

Or consider the algorithmic complexity classes underpinning all of this, not just P vs NP, but also whether quantum computers are actually a distinct class, since that is not proven yet either afaik. The reason we're moving to quantum resistant algos in the first place.

The models are really good at cryptography.

Remember when OpenAI published 700 math break throughs and absolutely none involved cryptography?

None except for discrete math and number theory.

Um, we all are. Do you not want people routinely testing the locks that guard your home against attacks enabled by the latest technologies?

seems like a pretty bad analogy because, yeah, i don't care about my lock being tested lol? it's not a security device

That's a funny joke!

As are all companies working in quantum computing.

Eh, I hate Anthropic too, but this seems pretty tame. Lots of people have wanted to know the origin of those seeds even though they thought there was no back door.

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