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)
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.
I thought, that Information Theory could mathematically predict the computational challenge of factoring one massive number into its two original primes?
Is that not true? If you have just a random number (aka public key) can you just LLM your way to the private key??!?
And of course, many cryptosystems are reliant on primitives with much less algebraic structure.
But to be clear, LLMs would presumably break these cryptosystems by building new algorithms and writing code to break them, not by "intuiting" their way to a specific private key.
The rest of them rely on more practical considerations. Asymmetric crypto is generally based on some mathematical problem that we don't know how to solve yet (and think we never will) while symmetric crypto is generally based on brute-force-style mixing up the bits so thoroughly they seem impossible to unmix.