GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

Can the ships logs be found on the internet? If so, the model could've manufactured a fake key and corresponding message. I think this is unlikely but should probably still be considered.

Or, it found a human that solved it in the dataset and stole the solution.

And here I am using it to generate crappy text summaries of work.

I asked Astra to describe the content of pages 214-215 of the source it cited in this article (J. Rives Childs's The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers). It said it can't and it can't find this book online either.

psyop

TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.

This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.

A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

[flagged]

Here we go again, framing the tool as an autonomous agent, disregarding any "human in the loop" and their inquiries, direction, and ground knowledge.

Can we agree that future titles should read "[LLM] helped solve X" ?

This is how AGI happens. It gradually keeps getting better until one day we realize that they are tremendously capable all while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.