Mythos's encryption breakthrough is over most of our heads
The human in the loop is increasingly the bottleneck in AI-powered research
Anthropic put out a paper yesterday claiming that its Mythos Preview model discovered a method for cracking a proposed encryption scheme in half the time required by the previous state-of-the-art.
I’ll admit that even Anthropic’s relatively less-technical blog post about it is over my head. But this seems appropriate: As the researchers put it, this discovery is more about reaching the “limits of our own knowledge” than about cryptography.
For context: The U.S. government is prepping for the day when quantum computers render many of the world’s existing encryption schemes ineffective. Good encryption is essential to a secure internet, and much more. So the National Institute of Standards and Technology has proposed post-quantum schemes to the public, inviting researchers to test their strength against attempts to crack them.
Mythos’s discovery took just 60 hours and a billion output tokens. If priced at the current rate the company charges the public, that would have put the computing expense for this finding at somewhere a little north of $50,000 — chump change compared to what’s at stake when encryption fails. The pivotal insight is something Mythos evocatively called a Möbius Bridge.
Anthropic noted the casual, off-hand nature of the mere handful of prompts given to Mythos during this project, and included their text in the post. They are short, and riddled with typos and grammatical errors. One read:
no again the goal is that we have highly inteligent [sic] model as good top researcher, we want to find new attacks
The final prompt read:
again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly [sic] hard findings.
The two human researchers behind those prompts aren’t cryptography experts, so what they found in a week took them nearly a month to verify. They say they still have a lot of work to do to understand the full results.
The larger moral isn’t spelled out, but it’s hard to miss: The experience of being the slow, ignorant bottleneck-in-the-loop is coming for us all. When the AI companies say their models are on the cusp of being able to do the AI research themselves, we should take them seriously.
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