Comment by glimshe
6 hours ago
Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical.
Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)
"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.*
That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography.
* And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.
Someone wrote a prompt, that included instructions for finding the problem itself and got handed a solution by a machine trained on all available text. I don’t see any achievement for the prompter. As for the machine, we can’t keep being perpetually shocked 24x7. It’s tiring (unless if we’re being paid for it)
It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.
I’m pretty sure the Beale ciphers are a hoax, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.
Thank you.
More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.
What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.
Not being impressed must make you feel very smart, yeah?
Is that why you feel the need to share it with the class?