You’re asking why people are being “dramatic” about an automated system that can do what highly specialized experts get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do?

It’s just fascinating to see how AI’s accomplishments are being systematically downplayed. I guess when an AI proves that P!=NP, I’m going to read on this forum “so what, mathematicians prove conjectures all the time, and also, we pretty much always knew this was true anyway”.

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localuser13 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am sceptical because AI companies, and anthropic in particular, like to overplay their achievements and build undeserved hype. I also don't understand all the caveats (maybe official announcement is more clear what this really means).

But yeah, if their model can reliably write an exploit for novel bugs (starting from a crash, not a vulnerable line of code) then it's very significant. I guess we'll see, right?

edit: Actually the original post IS dramatic: "Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe? For nearly 20 years the deal has been simple: you click a link, arbitrary code runs on your device, and a stack of sandboxes keeps that code from doing anything nasty". Browser exploits have existed before, and this capability helps defenders as much as it helps attackers, it's not like JS is going anywhere.

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layer8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It would be warranted if Mythos could jailbreak an up-to-date iPhone. (Maybe it can?) That would actually also be nice, “please rewrite without Liquid Glass”.

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Shank 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I guess when an AI proves that P!=NP,

What would be the practical impacts of this discovery?

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nine_k 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Likely all existing cryptography would become crackable, possibly some of it, very readily.

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rogerrogerr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(Assuming you mean P==NP)

Would it become crackable, or just theoretically crackable?

E.g. it's one thing to show it's possible to fly to Mars, it's another thing to actually do it.

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localuser13 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not really:

* It's possible - very likely even - that even if somehow P=NP, the fastest algorithm for any NP problem turns out to be something like n^1000, which is technically P, but not practical in any way.

* The proof may not be constructive, so we may just know that P=NP but it won't help us actually create an algorithm in P (nitpick: technically if P=NP there's a construction to create an algorithm that solves any NP problem in P time, but it's extremely slow - for example it involves iterating over all possible programs).

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fwip 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you read it backwards - that's a possible consequence of P==NP, not P!=NP.

	▲	nine_k 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I meant the equality. We already operate on the assumption that P ≠ NP, so little would change if that were proved.

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jannyfer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn’t it the opposite?