GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

85 points39 comments2 hours ago
iltk

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.

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donatj

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

sehw

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

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eis

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.

onesandofgrain

psyop

Legend2440

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.

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qprofyeh

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" ?

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dyauspitr

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.

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