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.
That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.
To my mind, "sidestepping the question of consciousness" and "sidestepping any notion of consciousness" mean very different things.
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.
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.
Can we agree that future titles should read "[LLM] helped solve X" ?
one of the math breakthroughs was approximately a combination of "do a breakthrough" and "keep going", which isn't really providing direction or ground knowledge.
would be nice to know the prompt(s) and amount of human involvement
Yes. Similar to how your manager shouldn't get your credit for everything she asks you to do.
If anyone downvotes you I will defend your honor.
HELP
The first step is to take each letter and turn it into a pair of letters from ADFGVX but the second step is then a keyed columnar transposition.
Even if it isn't a simple substitution cipher as you said, all the model did was try a decryption key that had already been found and was publicly accessible. This is basically a nothingburger.
Even with handwritten Japanese Gemini has been flawless.
Although I do wonder if something is not lost. I no longer stumble though my forgotten Hiragana…
Back to the article, can our new LLM god encrypt something so well he himself could not decrypt it( without the key of course)
The something that's lost is the human communication of course. Has been happening for decades though, just accelerated.
I ask this not having eaten at a Michelin starred restaurant, but having eaten at some otherwise very nice ones. Hell, if I can't make up my mind at a perfectly run-of-the-mill joint, I'll ask the server for the recommendation.
Now, regarding the "point", I guess going there in person but not interacting much with the server is mainly about being able to say they went there and that they can post about it on social media and feel like they are keeping up with the Joneses.
We know that the us government usually has private/custom versions of technology available to the general public, but much better.
so the true next frontier might not be just raw intelligence but rather larger context window?
Or a combination of all those things.
Given the fact that humans reach emotional conclusions first, and then only accept evidence that justifies already-held beliefs, it would be a waste of time to try to change your mind.
denial of our nature is a valid course of action. another course is to accept such limitations and free up memory to be used otherwise.
“Oh GPT-9 found a solved solution on internet and claimed as its own.”
Google says it translates to "troops shift"
If so, I don't understand how this was difficult at all... Can't you just do a dictionary attack and then check if the resulting phrase forms a sentence?
I don't understand how this couldn't be done by someone in their house with access to a computer and a German dictionary.
Maybe I'm messing something? Was the rearranging of the letters random in some non-deterministic way that wasn't known up front?
But let us use this and tell politicians that "Astra broke SOTA encryption", so AI must be banned.
- MC 900 Foot Jesus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVm8oZx9WSM
Also relevant to today's AI concerns:
https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/
But I got nothing on Daniel Bordeau, who in the past week seems to have built himself a whole code breaking factory!
After I gave up (mostly because ChatGPT had given me incomplete information needed to solve it) I checked the source of the dispute. It was a site very similar to this one and someone had an AI agent working on the same problem, publishing dozens or hundreds of pages of notes. The agent found the solution page and concluded it was wrong because many of the 32 source passages supposedly didn’t contain enough text.
I dug up the PDF of the book and found the mistake - whenever a passage continued onto the next page, the agent wasn’t including that continuation. The passages weren’t actually too short.
Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.
I don’t mean that to say AGI is here or easy or necessarily that close but it’s likely going to feel like one thing after another until one day most of these things that make you think “how could something so capable be that dumb” are largely solved.
This headline is misleading.
Then it’s OK, they can reproduce known attacks, but that’s just pattern matching against papers already in the training data.
Then it’s OK, they found previously unknown attacks on SpoC and a flaw in KINDI’s security proof, but those are obscure competition schemes nobody uses.
Then it’s OK, Claude found a new attack on HAWK that cuts the effective security of a NIST post-quantum signature candidate roughly in half, but HAWK isn’t deployed and a human researcher was involved.
Then it’s OK, Claude independently found a new cryptanalytic attack on AES that improves the previous best technique by 200–800×, but it’s only 7-round AES, not the full 10 rounds.
Then it’s OK, it found a practical key-recovery attack on 13-round LEA that runs in under an hour instead of requiring ~2^86 work, but LEA has 24 rounds.
Then it’s OK but none of this breaks a production cipher.
Wake me up when it breaks full AES.
Then—
23KtkdEkMWBrV13x3vi7f
I was surprised to see that the message was sent on November 27, 1918. That's a few weeks after the war ended, and I won't have expected the German military to still be monitoring military activity in the Black Sea, given how far that is from Germany.
People don’t like it, however, for a whole host of reasons.
I don’t like it either, to be honest - for there the abyss may also stare into you - but I also often find that the things which we don’t like thinking about are critically important things to think about.
I also reach the same conclusion as you: it does not matter. If I cannot discern whether I am responding to a human- or LLM-written response, then we are back to zombie cats in boxes - and therefore the answer as to whether this precious magical spark we call consciousness (which may or may not exist anyway) exists in our interlocutor becomes moot.
And as I say - I may or may not be conscious. I seem to myself to be conscious, based on my understanding of the term - but I cannot prove that what goes on behind my eyes is the same as what goes on behind yours, or even that anything much is going on at all. Perhaps there’s just a narrative layer that likes to use “I” that parasitically explains the universe and the actions of the host to itself, and spreads between hosts through neurolinguistic programming and coadaptation. Maybe that’s what “we” are. I don’t know.
That said, perhaps I am wrong, and that is no small part for me of why this question should be earnestly considered and discussed. How can we possibly seek to understand or define machine intelligence before we examine our own.
One of the things you learn in eastern style form of meditation is that "you" (the canvas-experience consciousness) are neither the source of your senses (obviously), nor of your ideas, nor of your emotions. All three are simply things that happen to "you". Even your ideas of "I" are generated and you experience them.
And yet the fact that the canvas-experience consciousness exists is the most irrefutable thing there is, because there IS experience. Is it a dream? Is it a simulation? Well, whatever it is, IT IS.
And just as that is obvious and irrefutable, it also seems pretty much impossible to show that anything other than yourself has this canvas-experience consciousness. As you say, you cannot know that behind my eyes there is this also.
Edit: Intelligence is also orthogonal to consciousness entirely. As I said your consciousness is not the generator of intelligent thoughts, so it is perfectly possible that intelligent thoughts can be generated by not-conscious systems, and for conscious systems to be not-intelligent.
- Dijkstra
Yes, that Dijkstra.
1: Can we define consciousness in a way that includes humans, does not include emachines, and does not accidently exclude the disabled or or nerudivergent without just restating the idea that being human is equivalent to being conscious?
2: If you can't manage that definition then you must ask whether the risk of accidently giving rights to a non-conscious thing or the risk of taking away rights from a truly conscious (but different) thing will be worse.
Given the high cost of what happened to the Jews and others throughout history, and the low cost of simply not torturing machines, I think we have to air on the side of caution and just treat anything which claims to be conscious as conscious.
Doesn't seem like a very good metric.
A piece of paper with the words "I am conscious" claims to be conscious. A dog does not claim to be conscious.
So you need to handle that somehow, but you can't just patch dogs (or octopuses) into "conscious" group, because you can draw a straight line between humans and bacteria and, along pretty much any obvious metric you choose, there's thousands if not millions of species of life forms currently existing to uniformly space through intermediary points. If the border between "conscious" and "unconscious" includes humans in the "conscious" set and bacteria in "unconscious", then you need to explain why the two animals closest to it on either side are where transition happens.
I don't claim to be able to define it. I just know that we have a fairly binary choice here. When people can't agree then the cost benefit should make the decision until people can align.
With machine consciousness one path leads us to p-zombie's and Holocausts. The other might cost someone $50 or a few extra keystrokes.
Sorry, but folks can just open up their wallets until we can align on an answer.
The global warming debate is similar. Is global warming man-made? Who cares. We have a binary choice: "do nothing" or "do something".
If we do nothing we risk preventable extinction. If we do something it might cost a few bucks for no good reason. The choice is clear.
You can apply it to the dog example as well. Could a reasonable person think dogs are conscious? Yes. So we should be nice to them.
The cost of being kind is low and if we get it wrong we risk torturing a conscious being.
The eliminativism position is a hard to argue because 50%-80% of people are not going to be able to really engage with the argument from the start.
An alcohol blackout though is where you can see how confused our thinking is on this subject. What we call "consciousness" is deeply linked to episodic memory. We wouldn't say someone who is blacked out on alcohol is "unconscious". What is the "subjective experience" of being blacked out? The "proof" of subjective experience only exists in memory.
There still was an embodied person in the world having the experience drunk that they don't remember.
That is why I think it is just ridiculous to talk about the LLM having "consciousness" because we really just mean an embodied person in the world.
It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
The main problem is if you accept we really just mean an embodied person in the world, you have to accept that there is by definition no possibility of subjective experience after death. It seems like we are probably the descendants of delusional primates who simply could not accept this because the idea is so stymieing.
It's not ridiculous, unless you misinterpret it like you did here, and link it to consciousness.
Doomer argument is just that optimizers gonna optimize, and our own intelligence is just an optimization algorithm too, albeit highly general one -- and once we're building optimizers with comparative generality, we're facing possibility of one that out-thinks us and we can't control it anymore. The "alignment problem" is about how to ensure such sufficiently-smart optimizers end up optimizing for the same things we are, because any significant deviation here ends up in doom for us.
Consciousness never even enters the picture here. And it's not a given than it should.
(Incidentally, while hard sci-fi and not a paper, but also entirely unrelated to AI X-risk crowd, the books Blindsight and Echopraxia sketch a pretty convincing argument that consciousness may be an evolutionary disadvantage and it's not only not necessary, but may be holding us back.)
I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says:
Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist
The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again:
An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results
And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996.
Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now.
It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.
Common sense is ironically the hard part of AI, not the fix-point rule application.
So any exclamation of "it was just using common sense", is missing the forrest for the trees.
Still, OP’s argument still holds even if AIs today have much more data to rely upon.
The internet is at your disposal go write a bunch of rules that make use of that data to do common sense reasoning, I dare you.
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.
I don't really know what I'm talking about but I imagined the difference was always quantitative (in a nutshell: they need less time).
Washing machines can’t do anything humans do, they just remove labour. Trucks don’t do anything longboats can’t, it just need less labour and time/effort to build roads rather than canals. Computers can’t calculate anything humans can’t dry run by hand etc.
Everything in reality is about reducing time/effort/material/cost or achieving more with less resource.
What stops us from doing any specific thing is always allocation of resources - there's finite amount of time/effort/material/labor available, and past trivial amounts we need more and more people to agree on some allocation. Reduction of time/effort/material/labor costs of any thing is what moves it closer from "infeasible" to "feasible" for us to do. But again, short of violating laws of physics, it was never "impossible".
What I mean is that "can be done by humans" is ill defined. Are you allowed to use pencil and paper? That's not part of your body? Do you have to be strapped into a coffin for it to count as human-done? How about wheels, sticks and stones? Allowed to use those tools? How about an abacus? Or is electricity the line to draw?
The actual implication is, and always been, different: AI did something humans theoretically could, given enough time, motivation and budget, but they didn't, because it wasn't the best use of time or money. AI therefore demonstrates its value, by opening up problems that were previously uneconomical to solve.
This is less valuable than me asking chatgpt to find me a recipe.
Yes! I believe that class of people are called "investors."
Your point is basically correct, I think, but the illusion of value that a corporate entity offers, and the reality of the value that the corporate entity is creating, are distinct things.
We change as a society the definition of intelligence to "what humans can do better than AI".
We end up in a world where AI is only worse than humans in things where we are worse chimpanzees.
Immediate-term, it's pretty clear that natural division of labor is that computers do the thinking, and humans do the menial, manual work that requires mixing precision and power movements in field conditions.
Ironically the person verifying the output does both the thinking and doing in that regard. For without this - the output of an llm could be of zero value.
Which would make 99% of us "not thinking" 99% of the time.
I read that as saying that a human typically wouldn't have the time or the patience. But now with a sufficiently smart LLM, the problem becomes tractable.
S4STEN
The S should probably be a 2 instead.
The hard part is not that it's impossible for you to do at home, it's that nobody in 100 years has felt it was worth enough effort to try through enough words until the effort was as simple as prompting the LLM to do the work.
Not every value of AI has to be in the realm of superhuman intelligence, that's just what makes for the most discussion.
Maybe you can give it a try?
https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/unsolved-adfx...
So it's not just a dictionary attack. It's that plus modifying the word before using it.
Verifying sources is a recursive problem - where do you stop? Humans have intuitive feel for it, but agents don’t or at least not yet (I wonder if intuition is just a secondary neural net which is currently being added to the agents as we speak).
Also as a human you are able to examine agents erroneous trajectory, real or imaginary, without contaminating your own. Agent have a problem with that - as soon as someone else’s thought is in the context it can lose track of provenance and veracity. Sometimes I think we need a bloom filter to retroactively assign “dirty” flag to invalidated or questionable token spans already in the context.
Arguably, intuition is primary neural net, the only thing an LLM has without CoT, it just is spiky so humans only notice where it's below-average and just dismiss the rest as normal. Of course it's going to lag behind in some areas compared to others.
It can’t make it past the abstract, in some cases - just like most people!
I’m sure I can make some brand new “discovery” that is completely useless, which is why it wasn’t “discovered” in the first place.
Investors are not putting billions into OpenAI to crack historical ciphertexts. This is supposedly a trillion dollar general purpose artificial intelligence, but still can't reliably tell me how many p's are in 'raspberry'.
Cracking pre-computer era ciphers with LLMs is like me claiming I have a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine that will revolutionize all forms of transportation, and then for a demo bragging about how nicely I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.
I just asked chatgpt the run time error and this was the entire thing...
> Me: is `?mixed $foobar = null` a error in PHP 8.5?
> ChatGPT: No. In PHP 8.5, this is valid: `mixed $foobar = null` mixed includes null (as well as all other PHP types), so the default value is compatible.
> Me: did you miss the ?
> ChatGPT: Yes <SmileyEmojii> — I missed the ?. ?mixed $foobar = null is an error in PHP 8.5.
If I'd invested trillions of dollars in that industry I'd be getting worried...
Also it using emojii's and words describing emotions just makes my soul shudder.
It's not that they don’t generate useful things, they can and then the next minute they smash into the wall repeatedly because the door is 3ft to the left.
Since it's stochastic by nature you never know which the answer is going to be and they are making the same kinds of mistakes they where making a couple of years ago, I'm not sure it's actually solvable with the current approach.
It quite literally is. Right here, right now. It’s happening before your eyes, you’re actively engaging with it.
Anthropic's alignment lead two weeks ago: "What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement"[2]
The media, last week: "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"[3]
Meanwhile, the topic of this thread is how ChatGPT decoded a century-old ciphertext using a known method and a published key. :-| One of these four items is not in the same ballpark as the others.
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/anthropic-openai-ai-existent...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/ai-superi...
>I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.
I like it!
but most things are unsolved because nobody even knows they exist
In NZ there's a famous story about gold miners who were mining one side of a river, and didn't go to the other side because it was too much work. One miner's dog swam over, so the dude went to get his dog and found a motherlode.
After all, the whole LLM thing started because they started increasing the parameter counts, even though there was no particular reason an AI would get better with more parameters.
Right. I don't quite subscribe to the strong doomer argument, but take water:
Water flows downhill. It's not conscious. I don't think it's anthropomorphism to say that water "seeks" the lowest point on the landscape. Often that seeking process is mostly harmless, sometimes it's devastating, and that's where you want levees and dams.
Now expand the same mathematical intuition out to other lowest-point-seekers in a high dimensional space. You don't even need to postulate a mind per se to see how optimizers can cause quite some mischief.
Meanwhile, Kids and Kittens are good examples of this behavior at the intelligent end of the spectrum: Given time, they'll find a way to get through any gap. They don't need to be as smart as the adults, the adults just need to turn their back for one minute too many. O:-)
As a parent of kids currently aged ~3 thru 7, I concur. Each age has its own ways, but what's worse, they can also coordinate and get you from an angle you wouldn't thought possible, playing your own beliefs about them against you.
iltk•1d ago
stalfie•1d ago
> 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•1d ago
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.
tirutiru•1d ago
stalfie•1d ago
Of course, that's given the sequence of events as written is correct, and that Astra presumably did not cheat by brute forcing all historical events around the date of the transmission in advance, found an event that could fit with the message, invent a plausible cipher to make the message fit that event, and then lie about retrospectively validating the information.
I would assume that such a process would be obvious from the reasoning chain, and so then the only remaining plausible scenario is that the writer of the article is lying.
The most likely explanation by far is that the cipher was just solved, and OP does point this out to be fair.
jonplackett•1d ago
jstanley•1d ago
meindnoch•1d ago
So it used a known key. It didn't come up with a key from thin air. The only gotcha is that apparently this key was used two weeks earlier than it was documented (maybe the operator was using the wrong page from the codebook?).
conmod278•23h ago
iAMkenough•21h ago
ricardobeat•21h ago
binlog•19h ago