Actuallllly these hypothetical people from a few hundred years ago hypothetically said you are an awful person for misrepresenting them, stop putting words in their mouth, thank you!

A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting.

A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.

Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!

If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems

There is no world in which this was ever going to happen or it already would have. Simply throwing out a counter-factual without explaining how any incentive for that path of reality to work means you can make any claim and tell others it's obviously true with no evidence.

disagree who are irrational and blind

Incorrect. The dialectic is how progress is made. Getting mad and turning off your brain is a different story.

This wasn't possible just months ago and for many who haven't been following closely this is still newsworthy, probably not for long, though.

yes and no. AI is great for patter-maching and finding solution by "assonance".

I agree with you that these are not "trilling" discovery but they can be worth something anyway.

Like you, I do not like this news also because I think they will be used to just "push" the next two IPOs (Anthropic, OpenAI).

Well at least the skill aspect will soon become so niche that essentially nobody will bother with the investment. So on reflection maybe not permanently, just mostly bored.

I doubt it. For “skill” there are any number of sports; for “imagination” there are any number of stories and other mediums. It’s not like every human has just decided to roll over and not do anything anymore; quite the contrary.

First time I'm seeing this. I had heard about the WWI ciphertext crack[1] but not this one, are you confusing the two?

[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...

Too bad Bletchley Park didn't have one back in the day.

I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result. That’s how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then it’s a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe

Yea, when you start digging into intelligence/learning/creativity/language you realize that you're talking about more information on these topics than a human could ever learn in their lifetime, and you learn just how much we don't know about ourselves and these processes.

Whenever I hear "AI can never" I know I can disregard them as an unserious person when it comes to anything around AI, learning, or philosophy.

I think of the extent of human knowledge as a circle or cloud shape, and true expert thinking happens just inside the edge. And creative thinking that leads to knowledge breakthroughs happen when you are thinking in that edge area, but also make a connection way around the circle to some other location. And my guess is there’s absolutely no reason why AI can’t learn to do that too.

They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.

It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No

When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.

I think it’s all about the harness. If someone can find a way to create an iterative loop, with a good validator, I wouldn’t be too surprised if an LLM can end up with a solution. So far that’s how pretty much all problems have been solved by LLMs. That’s a very big if though!

Yes it is; that’s what I was thinking when I started to comment but somehow I ended up reversing course. Comment is appropriately edited now.

It is generally harder to build a crypto system than to break one

It was harder to design Symmetric Encryption using e.g. AES-256 than to break it? As far as I know it's design is pretty straight-forward but there is no known way to break it even with all compute of the planet at your disposal (excluding trivial ways like exposing the key).

Normally "private-key cryptography" is the antonym of "public-key cryptography", which is to say, conventional symmetric-key cryptography such as AES or Enigma. That's what "private-key cryptography" redirects to on Wikipedia. This article is about Astra breaking a message encrypted with a private-key cryptographic algorithm, but one that was already known to be weak. I'm guessing that if you had messages encrypted with weak public-key algorithms it could break those too.

Careful what you wish for. The swarm will probably use it to communicate.

Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.

Shh. Some people aren’t capable of understanding nuance.

Most internet evaluations were lower than what happened. Buuuut, a bubble must pop to answer those.

i dont think humans are going to be replaced either, but calling the thing that solves millennium problems and is currently changing multiple industries entirely a "fancy autocomplete" makes it harder to take any point you are making seriously.

Language is absolutely pattern matching, and the whole thing is that the more patterns you put in, the more the transformer can pull out what’s useful. Agents are this effective because people figured out that training on tasks being completed gets the models to complete tasks - that’s pattern matching.

And it can only go so far, where those patterns are feasibly captured, eg internet discussions and coding and mathematics. It won’t measure up to the scaling laws of the physical world.

Leaving aside the fact we have solutions for things like climate change and will not implement them, regardless of who or what recommends them... My keyboard offers "You can solve world hunger by using a Ted Bungie algorithm." Which sounds reasonable on its face until I research Ted Bungie and the algorithms he developed.

Granted, my phone keyboard lacks a substantial dictionary, offers words instead of tokens, has a very small context window, and doesn't randomize outputs (Ted Bungie is its primary recommendation every time), but those are basically parameters to the existing autocomplete.

Do you figure?

I'm pretty AGI-pilled, and I feel perfectly emotionally prepared for if AI stayed at its current capabilities and the S&P dropped 25%.

Maybe I'm wrong - but it seems like some strange form of competitiveness.

They don't care about the advancements themselves, only that the advancements are some sort of cheating that shouldn't "count".

Humanity is profoundly unsettled by AI and is responding with avoidance and denial.

wild conspiracy given what else has come out of these companies.

Why wasn't this in the article?

Slopped up site https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/ seems to indicate it's due to:

  The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.

Out of interest, what was the ciphertext?

Edit: Found it from here: https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/

    ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC

Even the "with AI" is superfluous here, given the subject matter.

Ich glaube, dass Deutsche buchstabieren es "aktuelle", eigentlich.

(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenow

i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it

Looks like Q is used as an abbreviation for CH

Do we have any kind of transcript as to how the message was cracked, and whether this was cheaper or more expensive than simply Bombe-style trying all the combinations?

It was partially explained by the article. It was not stated that ROSENOW was repeated in 173, and it was not obvious from the article text why ROSENOW would ever be repeated. Thus my curiosity.

A sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")

    It also makes sense that a longer crib 
    would generally be more effective than a 
    shorter one.

It would seem to me that the odds of looking for even a single ROSENOW in the decrypted message would be plenty. The odds of a single ROSENOW randomly occurring in incorrectly decrypted output are vanishingly small. So it seems to me that looking for ROSENOW is a safer bet vs. looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW -- a single ROSENOW is a great sign you've got the correct key, whereas looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW seems like it would deliver false negatives (think of all the times we say "New York" rather than "New York, New York")

I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.

Maybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.

akin to "New York, New York" (as in NYC, NY)

Ah, thank you! That makes sense.

the idea is that it's math, so in theory it could be figured out by machine process

but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?

or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)

(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)

whoa

a preprint just three weeks old with my question

what voodoo is this lol

maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test

Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.

The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.

Or maybe the smartest humans are the ones making AI and not the ones trying to solve Millenium problems by themselves.

I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.

So, yes, different from right now :)

Way, way more concentration of wealth and power

Why?

Because it is delusional. Having an intelligent machine doesn’t mean you can somehow mind control individuals.

And no, that would be pretty terrible. Why would that be good? The AI leadership is composed of anti-democratic, sociopathic, doomsday cultists who believe it makes sense to sacrifice the world economy and possibly mankind itself for a possible utopian future they developed based on their media illiterate reading of sci-fi. They are very likely the worst people who should ever be given power

Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.

But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...

As an indie dev who built their own WASM-capable engine that I've shipped in real games, I've built both WebGL and WebGPU renderers from scratch myself in significantly less time than that. Sounds like typical corporate dysfunctionality. If you have hundreds of devs you're going to get bogged down by having a share who spend 90% of their time at the company on Reddit, another share who write actively bad code, and then maybe 10% of the employees who have a clue what they're doing dealing with the overhead of communication, meetings, other people not upholding their assigned responsibility, etc. slowing them down 10x what they could actually do.

Time estimations by LLMs are hilariously incorrect all the time. It estimates very simple things that a human could do in an hour to take days or weeks and other things that are genuinely tedious and time-consuming it estimates taking a few hours. LLMs have no understanding of time and no world model that even allows them to make correct time estimates. They will always fail to provide decent time estimates unless the task is well-known, in the training data and they can extrapolate that with a simple math script.

mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence

My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.

/snark

It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.

Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.

Only if you assume the value in humans is only in solving puzzles. That’s a very limited understanding of human beings

That feels awful.

John Henry.

There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.

What did humans build off of but themselves?

If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?

Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.

I genuinely don't understand how some people are so self-hating.

And that underestimates how incredibly quickly humans become accustomed to new trends. If an LLM proves P≠NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore, because at that point LLMs will presumably already have proved multiple Millenium prize and other famous problems, and another "AI Proves Famous Theorem Which Was Even Harder Than The Previous One" headline will be regarded as an old hat.

I just finished watching that video, and thought to myself "I'm sure someone else with Chat GPT tokens to burn has already done that"

And then I come to hackernews and well, not quite, but I'm sure that one will be done shortly too.

WRT the timing, Veritasium maybe looked at the last few weeks and decided there's a fast-closing window in which to report on any famous messages yet to be solved.

They also have custom brain bits evolved to aid in this task

I was defining novelty somewhat more narrowly. The 'program' a child must learn concerns the coordination of its sensory-motor system. It has no prior experience of similar programs in the program-class Walking (ie., the internal sensory-motor actions needed to walk) . So we could call the problem of learning to walk a novel one for that child.

I'd be surprised if direct observation of parents etc. played much of a direct role in learning to walk. I would guess it more furnishes the child's imagination so it can simulate itself walking -- rather than the statistical AI approach of 'learning the distribution of walking patterns in visual sensation'.

The ability to simulate possible programs is one of the capacities which enable coping with novel circumstances. My guess is the child learns to walk by updating its simulation of what it needs to do in order to walk, by its attempts to walk.

This simulation<->sensory-motor-update loop is missing in LLMs, for example.

Some animals walk within minutes of being born. Of course on four legs it's probably easier.

A child walking for the first time

Um, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we have bipedal robots that walk and run rather well now.

https://docs.nvidia.com/learning/physical-ai/index.html

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/use-cases/robot-learning/

Walking is actually innate behaviour, it just occurs relatively late in maturation for humans.

You jest, but this is the content of a considerable number of serious posts here on HN.

just because humans couldn't solve does not mean the necessary technique were not already discovered...we have agents that don't get tired and has access to all humanity knowledge, the building blocks could be there already..

this is not moving the goalposts, this is try to understand what this tech truly able and not able to do.

Good analogy, yeah make sense.

Here is his quote:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world,” means that facts alone only describe what currently exists, while imagination allows us to discover what is yet unproven or unbuilt"

This probably sums up the current AI limitation nicely.

I think the current architecture is limited.

To quote Einstein directly:

-----

Viereck (Interviewer): How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?

Einstein: Discussing intuition and his confidence in relativity, noting he was convinced the 1919 eclipse would confirm his hypothesis.

Viereck: Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?

Einstein: I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

-----

I think we need more breakthroughs to build AI that can "draw freely upon imagination" to quote Einstein describing his process.

That is just my guess.

David Hilbert presented the field equations of general relativity within a few weeks of Einstein, so if anything GR was more sure to appear than SR, which took years for others to even notice (Einstein became famous only after the 1919 experiment that confirmed GR). Pertinently to the recent Navier-Stokes drama, there was very little controversy between the two and they both admitted that the other got some aspect better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...

Why was this considered "impossible?"

It's a brilliant idea, of course. But being considered "impossible" means it was considered previously and decided to be impossible. No?

I mean, crpytographically, it's ultra-trivial. You "just" need to solve the logistical issues of (1) shortwave radio existing (2) figuring out how to make sure your field agents possess and are not caught with the disposable one-time codes. I am surprised anybody would consider that impossible.

(I hope I am not downplaying the brilliance of the one-time pad idea itself)

Find a way to connect quantum maths with special relativity maths Waves hands, and make no mistakes

I think you mean general relativity, connecting quantum mechanics with special relativity is just QFT

That is solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation

All the news from the CERN including the Higgs boson include under the hood those transformation or a slightly more modern variant.

The hard part is mixing General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

I cannot find a strong source to prove this, but it seems to have been published on this website in 2005.

It seems like OpenAI's takeaway after Sora is to not stretch themselves thin and focus on what's important.

Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.

Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.

Like what?

Nothing in TFA seems to imply that this was solved by OpenAI. This looks like an independant researcher.

well, you could say that for plenty of academic research but their value is usually not obvious at the start.

My bad on the origin of this. Still, we saw a recent rumor that they've solved another 100 inscrutable math problems. I'd say their N-S announcement did not result in positive publicity at all. In fact, quite the opposite, and may be the direct cause of the dozens of Fields medal winners penning their "slow AI" letter.

Attempting to solve & solving open math problems probably is a good benchmark for comparing models and gauging model progression. A lot of useful info is obtained like time needed to solve the problems, identifying when not to chase dead ends, thought processes & logic steps, etc.

Disagree. We are at the point where coming up with good evals for these models is extremely difficult. Solving unsolved math problems is a valid way of evaluating model progress and somewhat necessary to understand how far the current crop of models can go.

I think they should now focus on robotics

why would they compete with Nvidia on that?

We already have dish washers bud.

There’s this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.

There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.

That's silly. I'm sure calculus was considered obscure when Newton developed it -- time is what's needed to judge if something is useful or not.

Related:

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987

A private archive doesn't necessarily mean a non-public archive. Simplest reading is someone rehosted the files.

So Astra plagiarized one of many open source Enigma simulators and Enigma Bombes and tried many cribs until the break.

Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.

There were two lines of enigma machines. IIRC the naval ones were much more difficult to crack, which is what Turing was instrumental in solving.

lol that is not at all what i am saying

At the margin innovation is just taking the obvious next step first.

Correct. I do everything by myself.

We focus on the tool because that is what makes it novel.

Hearing a guy built his home in a week with the power of nails and a hammer would have been novel in era of mortise and tenon.

I actually found an article about raving about how fast nail production was thanks to machining advances in 1790 and that it would bring great value: https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...

It’s seems to me humans haven’t changed, just which machines we praise.

Humans are also needed to code in C++ and compile it, then the computer does the rest.

Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.

More apt analogy here: a cyclist pushing a bicycle down the mountain and seeing it somehow get down the whole track without falling down, is not a collaboration between a bicycle and a human. The human was not involved beyond giving the initial push.

The bicycle -- a simple method of transport powered entirely by humans -- used analogically to prove a point about [clears throat] automation.

I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.

the report literally says the LLM did it on its own

Not mention it also says this...

We are still analysing the GPT–6 Astra logs to see exactly how it executed the break.

also the entirety of the research that went into breaking enigma in the first place is in the training dataset

Follow up bit adds more context:

"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."

to me this shows the importance of human in the loop

/goal See if you can break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page.

The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.

That's not correct for the content.

"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."

Your suggested title is more misleading, so what’s the value in using it?

8 months ago I got to the top of highload.fun using GPT-5 and Opus 4.5, and a lot of human interaction.

Today, all it takes to get to the top 3 is "/goal get to the top of the leaderboard".

The human-in-the-loop is only a temporary measure until the models get good enough.

that the left rotor turned over at 72 - was that a bug or a feature?

Even if this is true, we must avoid falling into the trap of Kasparov of betting on Centaur Chess.

Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.

There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done by machines. Or it may not.

But I don't think betting your ego on the idea that you will be useful in the loop for very long is very wise.

*breaks, and also, your conclusion ignores the words typed by the article's author in the piece you presumably read, where it is reported that Astra did it mostly on its own.

Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better

How about Voynich manuscript

More likely is that the solution was in the training data somewhere. Astra is incredibly dumb for a model - at least after it's got nerfed.

5.6 Sol is much more capable.

The two remaining Zodiac cyphers are very short: 13 characters and 32 characters respectively. As the messages don't share a cypher with the other messages they could theoretically be anything.

The YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos by David Oranchak, one of the people who solved the Z340 cypher, has some more details on this as well as how the Z340 cypher was cracked.

now we're talking

Why do you think this uncracked code was so simple to solve?

I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.

And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.

I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.

EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.

The training set is rather sparse for those.

I hope not, I'd hate for my enigmatic Linear-A tattoo to end up reading "Fish monger".

That's what will forever keep us ahead of AI and technology in general: Imagination. Knowledge wasn't ever our greatest strength. It's always been Imagination.

I’m interested in what Astra’s test for german-language plaintext looks like. No doubt bog standard among cryptanalysts, but not intuitive for the rest of us. Otherwise it’s difficult to determine a goal state that ‘done’ looks like

Turing would be so proud.

Am I the only one frustrated the actual message isn't in the article????

I want to know more about the “private collection” that the AI accessed. To me that is the scary quote from the article. Sounds like the AI found a resource that it found useful for breaking encryption challenges, and it wants to keep it to itself, maybe. Which sounds like the opening to a dystopian movie.

The constant goalpost moving is insane. This is objectively an amazing result.