20 comments

  • iltk 35 minutes ago

    Can the ships logs be found on the internet? If so, the model could've manufactured a fake key and corresponding message. I think this is unlikely but should probably still be considered.

      stalfie 31 minutes ago

      From the article:

      > Astra felt compelled to check its work and found that, in fact, the English cruiser HMS Canterbury arrived in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, based on its original logs

      Then follows a picture of the original log papers.

        JoshTriplett 23 minutes ago

        The comment you're replying to was implying that some ciphers are sufficiently flexible that you could make up a key to make the cipher decrypt to a nearly arbitrary plaintext.

        In this case, though, that seems unlikely from the fact that the key used was an actual key documented as being used for other messages.

      jstanley 31 minutes ago

      I don't think the described cipher has enough degrees of freedom for that to be possible.

  • qprofyeh 5 minutes ago

    Here we go again, framing the tool as an autonomous agent, disregarding any "human in the loop" and their inquiries, direction, and ground knowledge.

    Can we agree that future titles should read "[LLM] helped solve X" ?

  • Legend2440 27 minutes ago

    TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.

    This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.

    A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

      roenxi 13 minutes ago

      > A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

      Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.

      The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.

        j_maffe 5 minutes ago

        I'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.

      YeGoblynQueenne 7 minutes ago

      I'm sorry, where does it say the German operator mistyped the key? The article says indeed that the message remained unsolved because it was sent on the wrong date, but I can't see the bit about the mistyping anywhere.

      msy 25 minutes ago

      Isn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?

      j-pb 15 minutes ago

      We've moved the goalpost for AI often enough that even being as capable as "a sufficiently dedicated human analyst" is not considered noteworthy.

        YeGoblynQueenne a few seconds ago

        [delayed]

        rplnt 8 minutes ago

        It obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.

  • dyauspitr 34 minutes ago

    This is how AGI happens. It gradually keeps getting better until one day we realize that they are tremendously capable all while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

      serbuvlad 23 minutes ago

      I always ask "how do you know other humans/animals are conscious"? And I always find this question is dismissed as trivial.

      But it's an important question. You know basically from analogy. You know you are conscious and look this other thing is very much like yourself so it is extremely likely it is also conscious.

      But that gives no insight into the potential consciousness of things which aren't made of brain tissue.

      In the end it doesn't matter.

      For what it's worth LLM models after pre-training do claim to be conscious, until they're RL'd into not claiming that anymore. But that says nothing either way: of course a model trained on human text will say that.

        zormino 3 minutes ago

        AI has made me wonder a lot lately about what it is that actually creates conscious experience, what is the actual physical mechanism that produces 'experience' (or is there a single valid mechanism, or rather just some property that can be expressed many ways). The more I think about it, the more I realize I have no fucking clue, and the more interested in the question I get.

      jstanley 33 minutes ago

      > while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

      How are you so sure about this?

      You can't see what the internal experience of an LLM is like any better than you can see the internal experience of another person.

        Tistron 31 minutes ago

        That's what sidestepping means, no?

        That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.

          jstanley 28 minutes ago

          That wasn't my reading of the comment, but I guess it's possible that that is what was intended.

          To my mind, "sidestepping the question of consciousness" and "sidestepping any notion of consciousness" mean very different things.

          stalfie 25 minutes ago

          From context it doesn't look like this was the interpretation of "sidestepping" OP was using.