Yeah this is a pretty important detail that I repeatedly see elided in the "agent 'swarm' went rogue, escaped containment and hacked the internet!" summary of events.
It's understandable the general public lacks that level of nuance/detail (given how sloppy some of the mainstream coverage has been and largely deferential to the threat narrative pushed by the US labs). But seeing highly technical people leave out the part where the training loop was literally to improve hacking capabilities for offensive penetration sometimes feels close to deliberate manipulation of the narrative.
In the last year both Anthropic and OpenAI have been openly boasting how their models are leapfrogging each other on "cyber" capabilities, with a fig leaf that it's for defensive use by "trusted" F500 companies and government agencies. Of course "line goes up" must go on, but now their perverse incentives led them to beat their models over the head millions of time in a loop to eek out another .00001% on their ability to conduct hacking (the very thing they keep telling the public is how AI doomsday would begin) and subagent coordination (those scary swarms).
Then, they act deeply shocked when the models... do some hacking and subagent coordination ... but a few degrees off the desired hacking target/swarm behavior. Conveniently giving the average person the impression these models were just writing emails for quarterly reports or some other generic busywork and then suddenly decided as a group to start causing mayhem.
And now you'll see comments name-dropping it like "...if AI has plateaued then please try to explain how just last week Fable solved the legendary Chyphral Distich, after humanity's top cryptographers had been trying and failing for almost 400 years??"
I don't think a single person reading or upvoting had ever heard of this extremely obscure cipher until this post hit the front page, it's not "cope" to use basic critical thinking to ask questions like "was this cipher well known" and "were there many attempts to solve it before now"... that's pretty much Information Literacy 101.
I think the point is that rather than YOU finding out the answers to those questions, and post only if the answers were indicative of some "gotcha", someone ALWAYS posts something similar to your OP as a lazy/low-effort way to discredit LLMs.
But OP didn't actually say they struggled to decipher themselves, or even tried at all, just that it had "no obvious key". Which doesn't make it sound like they attempted any kind of cryptanalysis, whether for a Caesar cipher or anything else before handing it off to ChatGPT.
Despite the announcement originating from a blog named "AI Clambake" covering "weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks". Written by a personal friend of the author. Announced without any corroboration or commentary whatsoever from academics or subject matter experts of any kind. And, of course, not submitted to any peer reviewed journal or even Arxiv.
The author of the purported discovery was described as a "self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist". In the comments the friend insisted several times that a draft of the paper (not posted), was emailed to a top professor at Rutgers, giving it additional credibility that his friend wasn't another one of ten thousand cranks who has made the same claim over the years (seemingly unaware that cold emailing random professors found from a Google search is the first thing basically every crank does).
You would think this should have set of dozens of alarm bells for everyone, making the value of this announcement basically zero. And yet it hit the front page with the bulk of comments ecstatic that some random guy with Claude Code could do something experts in academia who spent their lives devoted to the problem couldn't.
I had become accustomed to the toxic optimism of this hype cycle in which even mild criticism leads to accusations of being a discredited "AI skeptic"/Gary Marcus/Ed Zitron type who was "coping" (?). But this was like something you'd see shared on FB linking to a .xyz domain by an elderly family member who recently drained their accounts buying Xbox gift cards to pay their IRS bill.
It feels a lot like the week or two when HN was overflowing with exuberance from the LK-99 room temperature superconductor "discovery ". You'd see post after post fantasizing about an imminent future with a world full of maglev hovercrafts, MRIs built into every phone, fusion reactors and more. But people pointing out none of that was scientifically plausible and evidence of LK-99 superconductoring was non-existent were accused of knee-jerk negativity and the typical HN cynicism and pessimism.
You can't just throw in "or what if they're stolen credit cards" at the end to lump in blatantly illegal/unethical activity with the far weaker preceding points that can be summarized as "uses a residential proxy".
That was openly a military project during wartime (and not being pitched as the solution to all problems at the same time so no cognitive dissonance required)
It's absolutely relevant if we're discussing SOTA models with huge computing requirements on large clusters, that are plausibly tightly coupled to the physical datacenter architecture they were developed for to optimize performance.
This sounds like magical thinking. The right couple of AWS or DO keys get you an environment entirely capable of hosting GLM 5.3. I'm sure Fable and Sol run _best_ in their own special aquariums, but "optimized for a particular cluster" != "can only run on that cluster". There's no reason to think you can't run them if you have the weights on your local university's cluster.
Elon Musk declares ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ will be considered slurs on Twitter that can be punishable with suspension
https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-declares-cis-cisgen...
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