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Comment by mattmanser

13 hours ago

They don't have to.

Lot of people in this thread don't seem to be getting that.

If another model can find the vulnerability if you point it at the right place, it would also find the vulnerability if you scanned each place individually.

People are talking about false positives, but that also doesn't matter. Again, they're not thinking it through.

False positives don't matter, as you can just automatically try and exploit the "exploit" and if it doesn't work, it's a false positive.

Worse, we have no idea how Mythos actually worked, it could have done the process I've outlined above, "found" 1,000s of false positives and just got rid of them by checking them.

The fundamental point is it doesn't matter how the cheap models identified the exploit, it's that they can identify the exploit.

When it turns out the harness is just acting as a glorified for-each brute force, it's not the model being intelligent, it's simply the harness covering more ground. It's millions of monkeys bashing type-writers, not Shakespeare at one.

It’s strange to see this constant “I could do that too, I just don’t want to” response.

Finding an important decades-old vulnerability in OpenBSD is extremely impressive. That’s the sort of thing anyone would be proud to put on their resume. Small models are available for anyone to use. Scaffolding isn’t that hard to build. So why didn’t someone use this technique to find this vulnerability and make some headlines before Anthropic did? Either this technique with small models doesn’t actually work, or it does work but nobody’s out there trying it for some reason. I find the second possibility a lot less plausible than the first.

  • From the article: >At AISLE, we've been running a discovery and remediation system against live targets since mid-2025: 15 CVEs in OpenSSL (including 12 out of 12 in a single security release, with bugs dating back 25+ years and a CVSS 9.8 Critical), 5 CVEs in curl, over 180 externally validated CVEs across 30+ projects spanning deep infrastructure, cryptography, middleware, and the application layer.

    They have been doing it (and likely others as well), but they are not anthropic which a million dollar marketing budget and a trillion dollar hype behind it, so you just didn't hear about it.

  • Why are you EXTREMELY impressed? The level of hysteria and lack of objective thought by pro-AI people on this thread is extremely concerning.

    Vulnerabilities are found every day. More will be found.

    They claim they spent $20k finding one, probably more like $20 million if you actually dug into it.

    And if you took into account inference, more like $2 billion.

    The reason why no-one's done it is because it's not worth the money in tokens to do so.

> If another model can find the vulnerability if you point it at the right place, it would also find the vulnerability if you scanned each place individually.

They didn't just point it at the right place, they pointed it at the right place and gave it hints. That's a huge difference, even for humans.