alt Hacker NewsI’m with ya
I’ve even heard arguments that prediction is consciousness.
But using a Language-Model to break cryptography is still a stretch for me.
From the little I know, cryptography uses information theory to make sure that reversing the equation (aka finding the passowrd) is predictably impossible, given current compute standards for the foreseeable future (disregard quantum computer here though :) they’re not LLMs)
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I think you misunderstand. The idea is not that one feeds a cryptographic text to LLMs and they crack it. The idea is that one feeds a cryptographic algorithm to an LLM and they break it somehow. Bear in mind that cryptographers consider a "break" anything that reduces the strength of an algorithm, but that doesn't mean that it is practical to use the given "break" to obtain even one plaintext, let alone obtain them all.
The oversight in your thinking is that we have no proofs about how much computation is needed to break cryptography. For all we know, it could be possible to break all modern cryptosystems in under a second on a computer from a decade ago with the right algorithms.
This is how cryptography has been broken in the past: not just advances in the amount of compute we can do, but exponential speedups in the algorithms to break them. While I agree with the author of this post that modern cryptosystems are very secure and LLMs are not currently near breaking them, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider that if LLMs continue to get exponentially smarter they may make strides in cryptanalysis that we had never considered and break cryptography in unexpected ways. After all, many past cryptography breaks have come from previously unknown methods of cryptanalysis.