A next-word-in-the-sentence prediction engine can’t predict the factor of two insanely large prime numbers… tell me more captain obvious!

Edit: I know I’m naive of anything security, by a lot a lot. But still, this isn’t surprising

okay so silicon valley won't happen all the way

I don't really find the "because it's difficult" arguments convincing at all. Especially the one claiming it's hard because it requires designing and running a large number of tests and reasoning about the results of each one. That kind of tedious grinding is exactly where LLMs should shine vs humans!

The only convincing argument here is that these things are battle tested (I guess literally in most cases), with tons of research that never gets published because it's unsuccessful. A whole lot of human effort has gone into trying to break these things, and it's going to take a while before LLMs can equal and surpass that amount of human effort. And they might have to surpass it by many times to actually break these, if it is even possible.

Cryptographic systems are based on 1) mathematical impossibility of reversing some integer/mod calculation, 2) time required for a brute force attack, 3) correctness of algorithms and code used in implementations. The last part (algorithms and code) is where LLMs have a chance.

The first one is not similar to the mathematical breakthroughs LLMs are making recently. There is a loss of information in mods and integer computations making them one-way. The second one requires simply increasing bit-length to match the increased computer power.