Normally "private-key cryptography" is the antonym of "public-key cryptography", which is to say, conventional symmetric-key cryptography such as AES or Enigma. That's what "private-key cryptography" redirects to on Wikipedia. This article is about Astra breaking a message encrypted with a private-key cryptographic algorithm, but one that was already known to be weak. I'm guessing that if you had messages encrypted with weak public-key algorithms it could break those too.

But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed

It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No

When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.

I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result. That’s how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then it’s a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe

In math a lot of the spectacular results have been made by finding a counterexample or worming their way toward a proof that is very well defined.

There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?

But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"

But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.

This gets interesting.

One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.

Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.

IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.

I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.

They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.

We already have a plethora of cryptographic algorithms that literally anyone can use to send messages nobody can read with current technology, unless of course they have the key. You're using at least one of them right now to read this website.