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antics • today at 9:40 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Just to be absolutely clear, the giant OpenAI math dump replaces two (2) already efficient probabilistic algorithms with deterministic ones. Neither affects encryption as it is deployed today (one is a quantum algorithm, and the other is factorization over prime fields).

I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].

For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.

[1]: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108281944291393983


Replies

DoctorOetker • today at 10:23 PM

of course the frontier labs are testing their models on public key cryptography

of course it is questionable they would just dump cryptographic breakthroughs in some random batch of breakthroughs ...