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Comment by nickysielicki

1 day ago

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.

      2 replies →

    • 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.

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

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

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.

The models are really good at cryptography.

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

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.

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.