Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results

mkagenius

I also just finished writing a note - https://mkagenius.substack.com/p/notes-on-mythos-breaking-ae... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099977

john_strinlai

> They [anthropic] appear to have just told it to get some results and then strapped its nose to the grindstone until it found some. it is fun how well this works. i cant find the link immediately (will look and edit with it), but somewhere in the " hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx " thread, someone brought up a different conjecture breakthrough where the prompts were basically just repeated "no, keep going" until a result was found. edit: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a60b2eb-0b64-83ee-9c76-7931ca1de0... i especially like "you should do a breakthrough". each prompt is less than ~20 words. makes me really question the whole "prompt engineering" stuff.

simonw

> both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model That sentence gives the impression that Mythos might be released in the future. That's clearly not going to happen - it's already "released" in as much as selected, trusted partners can access it, and the rest of us get it in the form of Fable - which is Mythos but with filters that downgrade you if you try to use it for anything even remotely related to cybersecurity or biology. (The other day Fable 5 downgraded me to Opus after I asked it to explain the difference between tusks and teeth.)

throawayonthe

> I asked Claude for its thoughts, and it doesn’t mince words: “what makes this genuinely interesting — and, frankly, a little embarrassing for the field — is that none of the ingredients are exotic.” The TL;DR is that someone just did a much more thorough job applying all of our known tools. In short: the sort of things that attack AIs are wonderful at. did i just read two summaries/TLDRs (in a row) of the already-two-sentence summary right above?

simonw

This is good: > If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that . The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. [...] > On the other hand : if you think that models are super-intelligent or that AGI is already here, you should also stop thinking that. Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own.

bawolff

The prompt used to get this result is pretty crazy.