3 ms·

Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest c

by glimshe 20d ago

Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical. Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)

chr15m 20d ago
It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.
dakolli 20d ago
What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.
- scrollaway 20d ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
- computerex 19d ago
  Why don’t you solve such problems?Being “not impressed” sounds more like a knowledge gap on your part than an informed opinion.
  - card_zero 19d ago
    Pepper grinders have always impressed me, very effective devices, great at grinding out results, I mean pepper. I can't do it by hand at all!
    - nonethewiser 19d ago
      Sure you can, its just difficult to the point of being infeasible
  - EdwardDiego 19d ago
    Why are you so toxic?
    - computerex 17d ago
      How ironic for you to say that to me. Maybe you can use ai to help explain it to you.
rossy 20d ago
No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.
- honeycrispy 20d ago
  Thank you. More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.
  - qlte 19d ago
    A few months ago a post claiming an amateur deciphered Linear A hit the front page and quickly got almost 500 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107 https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/ https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/ 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.
parpfish 20d ago
I’m pretty sure the Beale ciphers are a hoax, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
geraneum 20d ago
Someone wrote a prompt, that included instructions for finding the problem itself and got handed a solution by a machine trained on all available text. I don’t see any achievement for the prompter. As for the machine, we can’t keep being perpetually shocked 24x7. It’s tiring (unless if we’re being paid for it)
chmod775 20d ago
"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.* That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography. * And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.
- IshKebab 19d ago
  I disagree. This may be some niche thing that I've never heard of but a) it's still non-trivial; it still would have been science fiction to solve it a few years ago, and b) have you already forgotten the Navier Stokes drama? That is not some niche thing I've never heard of. It kind of blows my mind how quickly people have forgotten both the state of AI in ~2010, and the outlook. If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. AI had been an unsolved problem for literally decades and it was firmly in the nuclear fusion/flying cars category.
  - u8080 19d ago
    "Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"
    - emanuele232 19d ago
      that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.
      - card_zero 19d ago
_fizz_buzz_ 19d ago
Humans are incredibly good at adapting. A few days ago AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. Now I'm already thinking: "Well, it was only a counterexample and it brute-forced its way to it." lol
- EdwardDiego 19d ago
  > AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. That's not what happened, go read about it harder, please.
  - _fizz_buzz_ 19d ago
    Sure. More precisely: they resolved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem as posed by the Clay Institute. Not sure what else "solving Navier-Stokes" could reasonably mean. A general closed-form solution probably doesn't exist. And numerical solutions have existed for decades. But of course there are still open questions like unforced solutions etc.
    - gjm11 19d ago
      I suspect EdwardDiego is referring to the brouhaha about whether OpenAI's training for the model that produced the alleged solution to the Millennium Problem about the Navier-Stokes equations was trained on material that included conversations Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had had with earlier OpenAI systems. I think there's a bit less to that than meets the eye. Yes, OpenAI's result builds on human work. It's possible that it builds on more human work than OpenAI admitted. But even if we suppose that everything Buckmaster and Alpöge did (which, btw, was itself very heavily LLM-assisted/generated work) was a necessary precursor to what OpenAI released, it's still the case that OpenAI's clankers completed the solution and Buckmaster and Alpöge didn't. My understanding from what Buckmaster has written about this is that the deep mathematical ideas behind their work (and presumably OpenAI's) are due to Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa. Those ideas are in the published literature, and human mathematicians and AI systems alike are allowed to use them, and doing so doesn't mean they didn't actually do something impressive. Mathematicians build on one another's work; that's how mathematics progresses and always has been. It may very well be that OpenAI's announcement has a serious problem of professional ethics, especially as their first version of it didn't even list Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa in its references. (On the specific question of what if anything they learned from B&A's work before that was published: OpenAI are now claiming that after investigating carefully they are confident that the model was not trained on anything Buckmaster and Alpöge did after early July. B&A had been working on this thing for much longer than that. However, on Buckmaster's account of things it wasn't until mid-August that they got beyond what he calls "preliminary results".) But! The results of B&A were themselves largely AI-generated. (From Buckmaster's statement: "on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable." That is: the LLMs found the proof, and B&A had to work to understand what the LLMs had done. It's not that humans did the thinking and AIs just did the gruntwork. (Except in so far as one might want to give all the credit for Real Deep Cleverness to C&MZ.) And! What OpenAI say their model has proved goes well beyond what B&A did. I don't see any way of slicing this that makes it unreasonable to say (unless it turns out that there's an error in the proof -- unlikely, given that it comes with Lean verification, but there have been misformalizations and Lean bugs in the past and there surely will be in the future) that AIs solved the N-S problem. No, they couldn't have done it without the work of C&MZ, but again: important mathematical work almost always builds on earlier important mathematical work, that's just how it is. Yes, if OpenAI are lying through their teeth their model might have had early access to B&A's ideas -- but it seems like most of the B&A work was actually done by AI systems anyway. It is (I think -- I am not an expert and in particular I have not so much as looked at OpenAI's publication) reasonable to say that the deepest ideas here came from humans, and that it was already widely expected that the N-S problem would be solved in the not-impossibly-distant future in something like the way it has been. So, sure, what the AIs have done here is much less impressive than if they'd settled the Riemann Hypothesis or (probably even harder) PvNP. But it's still a resolution of a famous mathematical problem that any human mathematician would have been very proud to have achieved.
uludag 19d ago
I personally think that beyond normalizing, we should be actively be trying to dismiss this with all the cynicism we have. What does Anthropic have to gain from writing this? Behind the the scenes what might Anthropic be failing to disclose? How many failed experiments do we not know about?
- badsectoracula 19d ago
  The article doesn't seem to be written by Anthropic.
saberience 19d ago
This was a basic cypher that effectively no one cared about. It wasn't famous or particularly notable. I would say, the only reason it was never solved was because not enough people actually cared about it to begin with. This isn't a big accomplishment.
ndiddy 19d ago
The Voynich theory I find most compelling is that it was a hoax made for a quack doctor, made to look like a foreign herbal manuscript. "Oh of course the local doctors can't help you, but my special book from a faraway land that only I can read may have the cure." Some recent analysis of the manuscript has found that the pages are more linguistically similar when read as individual flat sheets than how they're read when bound (i.e. whoever was writing the text was most likely going sheet by sheet and using the last completed page as reference for the text). The manuscript has only been bound once, in the fifteenth century (around when the vellum pages have been carbon-dated to), so whoever bound the manuscript was not able to "read" it. See https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/2331 https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/2331

by glimshe 20d ago

chr15m 20d ago

It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.

dakolli 20d ago

What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.

scrollaway 20d ago
[flagged]
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
computerex 19d ago
Why don’t you solve such problems?Being “not impressed” sounds more like a knowledge gap on your part than an informed opinion.
- card_zero 19d ago
  Pepper grinders have always impressed me, very effective devices, great at grinding out results, I mean pepper. I can't do it by hand at all!
  - nonethewiser 19d ago
    Sure you can, its just difficult to the point of being infeasible
- EdwardDiego 19d ago
  Why are you so toxic?
  - computerex 17d ago
    How ironic for you to say that to me. Maybe you can use ai to help explain it to you.

rossy 20d ago

No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.

honeycrispy 20d ago
Thank you. More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.
- qlte 19d ago
  A few months ago a post claiming an amateur deciphered Linear A hit the front page and quickly got almost 500 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107 https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/ https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/ 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.

parpfish 20d ago

I’m pretty sure the Beale ciphers are a hoax, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

geraneum 20d ago

Someone wrote a prompt, that included instructions for finding the problem itself and got handed a solution by a machine trained on all available text. I don’t see any achievement for the prompter. As for the machine, we can’t keep being perpetually shocked 24x7. It’s tiring (unless if we’re being paid for it)

chmod775 20d ago

"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.* That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography. * And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.

IshKebab 19d ago
I disagree. This may be some niche thing that I've never heard of but a) it's still non-trivial; it still would have been science fiction to solve it a few years ago, and b) have you already forgotten the Navier Stokes drama? That is not some niche thing I've never heard of. It kind of blows my mind how quickly people have forgotten both the state of AI in ~2010, and the outlook. If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. AI had been an unsolved problem for literally decades and it was firmly in the nuclear fusion/flying cars category.
- u8080 19d ago
  "Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"
  - emanuele232 19d ago
    that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.
    - card_zero 19d ago

_fizz_buzz_ 19d ago

Humans are incredibly good at adapting. A few days ago AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. Now I'm already thinking: "Well, it was only a counterexample and it brute-forced its way to it." lol

EdwardDiego 19d ago
> AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. That's not what happened, go read about it harder, please.
- _fizz_buzz_ 19d ago
  Sure. More precisely: they resolved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem as posed by the Clay Institute. Not sure what else "solving Navier-Stokes" could reasonably mean. A general closed-form solution probably doesn't exist. And numerical solutions have existed for decades. But of course there are still open questions like unforced solutions etc.
  - gjm11 19d ago
    I suspect EdwardDiego is referring to the brouhaha about whether OpenAI's training for the model that produced the alleged solution to the Millennium Problem about the Navier-Stokes equations was trained on material that included conversations Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had had with earlier OpenAI systems. I think there's a bit less to that than meets the eye. Yes, OpenAI's result builds on human work. It's possible that it builds on more human work than OpenAI admitted. But even if we suppose that everything Buckmaster and Alpöge did (which, btw, was itself very heavily LLM-assisted/generated work) was a necessary precursor to what OpenAI released, it's still the case that OpenAI's clankers completed the solution and Buckmaster and Alpöge didn't. My understanding from what Buckmaster has written about this is that the deep mathematical ideas behind their work (and presumably OpenAI's) are due to Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa. Those ideas are in the published literature, and human mathematicians and AI systems alike are allowed to use them, and doing so doesn't mean they didn't actually do something impressive. Mathematicians build on one another's work; that's how mathematics progresses and always has been. It may very well be that OpenAI's announcement has a serious problem of professional ethics, especially as their first version of it didn't even list Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa in its references. (On the specific question of what if anything they learned from B&A's work before that was published: OpenAI are now claiming that after investigating carefully they are confident that the model was not trained on anything Buckmaster and Alpöge did after early July. B&A had been working on this thing for much longer than that. However, on Buckmaster's account of things it wasn't until mid-August that they got beyond what he calls "preliminary results".) But! The results of B&A were themselves largely AI-generated. (From Buckmaster's statement: "on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable." That is: the LLMs found the proof, and B&A had to work to understand what the LLMs had done. It's not that humans did the thinking and AIs just did the gruntwork. (Except in so far as one might want to give all the credit for Real Deep Cleverness to C&MZ.) And! What OpenAI say their model has proved goes well beyond what B&A did. I don't see any way of slicing this that makes it unreasonable to say (unless it turns out that there's an error in the proof -- unlikely, given that it comes with Lean verification, but there have been misformalizations and Lean bugs in the past and there surely will be in the future) that AIs solved the N-S problem. No, they couldn't have done it without the work of C&MZ, but again: important mathematical work almost always builds on earlier important mathematical work, that's just how it is. Yes, if OpenAI are lying through their teeth their model might have had early access to B&A's ideas -- but it seems like most of the B&A work was actually done by AI systems anyway. It is (I think -- I am not an expert and in particular I have not so much as looked at OpenAI's publication) reasonable to say that the deepest ideas here came from humans, and that it was already widely expected that the N-S problem would be solved in the not-impossibly-distant future in something like the way it has been. So, sure, what the AIs have done here is much less impressive than if they'd settled the Riemann Hypothesis or (probably even harder) PvNP. But it's still a resolution of a famous mathematical problem that any human mathematician would have been very proud to have achieved.

uludag 19d ago

I personally think that beyond normalizing, we should be actively be trying to dismiss this with all the cynicism we have. What does Anthropic have to gain from writing this? Behind the the scenes what might Anthropic be failing to disclose? How many failed experiments do we not know about?

badsectoracula 19d ago
The article doesn't seem to be written by Anthropic.

saberience 19d ago

This was a basic cypher that effectively no one cared about. It wasn't famous or particularly notable. I would say, the only reason it was never solved was because not enough people actually cared about it to begin with. This isn't a big accomplishment.

ndiddy 19d ago

The Voynich theory I find most compelling is that it was a hoax made for a quack doctor, made to look like a foreign herbal manuscript. "Oh of course the local doctors can't help you, but my special book from a faraway land that only I can read may have the cure." Some recent analysis of the manuscript has found that the pages are more linguistically similar when read as individual flat sheets than how they're read when bound (i.e. whoever was writing the text was most likely going sheet by sheet and using the last completed page as reference for the text). The manuscript has only been bound once, in the fifteenth century (around when the vellum pages have been carbon-dated to), so whoever bound the manuscript was not able to "read" it. See https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/2331 https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/2331