[HN Gopher] AI cybersecurity is not proof of work
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AI cybersecurity is not proof of work
        
       Recent and related: _Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now_ -
       https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769089 - (198 comments)
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 187 points
       Date   : 2026-04-16 10:48 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (antirez.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (antirez.com)
        
       | andersmurphy wrote:
       | > What happens is that weak models hallucinate (sometimes
       | causally hitting a real problem)
       | 
       | So the bigger models hallucinate better causally hitting more
       | real problems?
        
       | nottorp wrote:
       | Seriously. We need a BuSab for IT.
       | 
       | This continous rush is not healthy. npm updates, replies to
       | articles that barely made HN 12 hours ago, anything like that.
       | It's not healthy.
       | 
       | Slow down.
        
         | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
         | Amtrak is slow and expensive, but the hype train is free!
        
       | neutered_knot wrote:
       | It is also not proof of work because of asymmetries between
       | attacker and defender. An attacker only needs to find one
       | exploitable issue before the defender finds it and patches it,
       | while the defender eventually needs to find all issues - and even
       | then can't really be sure they remediated everything.
       | 
       | The defender also not only has to discover issues but get them
       | deployed. Installing patches takes time, and once the patch is
       | available, the attacker can use it to reverse engineer the
       | exploit and use it attack unpatched systems. This is happening in
       | a matter of hours these days, and AI can accelerate this.
       | 
       | It is also entirely possible that the defender will never create
       | patches or users will never deploy patches to systems because it
       | is not economically viable. Things like cheap IoT sensors can
       | have vulnerabilities that don't get addressed because there is no
       | profit in spending the tokens to find and fix flaws. Even if they
       | were fixed, users might not know about patches or care to take
       | the time to deploy them because they don't see it worth their
       | time.
       | 
       | Yes, there are many major systems that do have the resources to
       | do reviews and fix problems and deploy patches. But there is an
       | enormous installed base of code that is going to be vulnerable
       | for a long time.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | > It is also not proof of work because of asymmetries between
         | attacker and defender. An attacker only needs to find one
         | exploitable issue before the defender finds it and patches it,
         | while the defender eventually needs to find all issues - and
         | even then can't really be sure they remediated everything.
         | 
         | It depends. Some classes of vulnerabilities can be excluded by
         | construction. This is usually seen as too hard to be
         | practicable, but AI potentially changes this.
        
       | 4qwUz wrote:
       | While I fully agree with the headline I find it surprising that
       | so many people implicitly claim familiarity with the aptly named
       | "Mythos". Mythos is closed and currently has the status of an
       | overhyped Anduril drone that failed contact with reality in
       | Ukraine.
       | 
       | If anyone has access to the mythical Mythos we'll see the contact
       | with reality.
        
         | RugnirViking wrote:
         | my understanding is that employees of several of the largest
         | companies in the world get access to it atm. Those employees
         | are overrepresented in places like HN
        
           | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
           | These employees may be as well under NDA, or their access may
           | be predicated on them not sharing actual data (like Oracle
           | and benchmarks). Anyway, you can't verify any claims
           | yourself, thus it might as well not exist.
        
       | baxtr wrote:
       | Interestingly enough: earlier today this discussion was trending:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769089 (Cybersecurity
       | looks like proof of work now)
        
         | RugnirViking wrote:
         | the article here is pretty clearly a response to the one you
         | posted
        
           | onionisafruit wrote:
           | It's only clear if you know it exists, and now I know it
           | exists thanks to gp.
        
       | qsort wrote:
       | A couple of alternative scenarios, although I'm not sure how much
       | stock we should put in them:
       | 
       | - what if at a certain level of capability you're essentially
       | bug-free? I'm somewhat skeptical that this could be the case in a
       | strong sense, because even if you formally prove certain
       | properties, security often crucially depends on the threat model
       | (e.g. side channel attacks, constant-time etc,) but maybe it
       | becomes less of a problem in practice?
       | 
       | - what if past a certain capability threshold weaker models can
       | substitute for stronger ones if you're willing to burn tokens? To
       | make an example with coding, GPT-3 couldn't code at all, so I'd
       | rather have X tokens with say, GPT 5.4, than 100X tokens with
       | GPT-3. But would I rather have X tokens with GPT 5.4 or 100X
       | tokens with GPT 5.2? That's a bit murkier and I could see that
       | you could have some kind of indifference curve.
        
         | Leomuck wrote:
         | Honestly, if every software project ran an AI-based security
         | check over their code, the software world would probably be
         | more secure. Of course, there are lots of projects who don't
         | need that, having skilled people behind it, but we've seen many
         | popular software projects (even by big companies) who didn't
         | care at all. So even a basic model would find issues.
         | 
         | Also, I find myself thinking more and more that the ability to
         | pay for tokens is becoming crucial. And it's unfair. If you
         | don't have money, you don't have access. Somehow, a worsening
         | of class conflicts. If you know what I mean.
        
           | serial_dev wrote:
           | Not only that, even if you would like to pay, the best model
           | providers could decide any day that they want to save on
           | cost, so they nerf the responses. Then you shipping on time
           | is at the mercy of these companies.
           | 
           | If you spend months shipping slop, because "models will get
           | better and tomorrow's models can fix me today's slop", what
           | happens when they not only do not get better, but actually
           | get worse, and you are left with a bunch of slop you don't
           | understand and your problem solving muscles gotten weak?
        
             | Leomuck wrote:
             | Good point indeed! I've been feeling Claude Code has gotten
             | worse for a while now, read many articles on it, overall
             | probably due to cost saving. But if you set your things up
             | to depend on it, that becomes a huge issue.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | > _essentially bug-free_
         | 
         | I would say that most software is going to have few _easily
         | exploitable_ bugs. Presence of such bugs will immediately cost
         | more than having them discovered and fixed.
         | 
         | Other bugs, those that do not lead to easy pwning of a system,
         | circumventing billing, etc, may linger as much as they
         | currently do.
        
       | redwood wrote:
       | What seems to be getting lost in the noise on this topic is that
       | security has always been about security in depth and mitigating
       | controls, in other words applied paranoia. There are always
       | threat vectors and we're seeing a change in the shape of those
       | vectors with more rapidity than ever before which is certainly
       | exhausting for everyone. But don't forget the fundamentals here
        
       | egormakarov wrote:
       | > Different LLMs executions take different branches, but
       | eventually the possible branches based on the code possible
       | states are saturated
       | 
       | With LLMs even the halting problem is just the question of paying
       | for pro subscription!
        
         | dtech wrote:
         | The proof of halting being unsolvable usually uses a specific
         | "adverserial" machine. In practice it's incredibly likely for
         | the halt question to be answerable for any specific real life
         | program.
        
       | alex_young wrote:
       | The whole framing is kind of uninteresting imo. If you spend more
       | time researching code you can find more bugs to exploit / patch
       | is not an earthshaking observation.
       | 
       | Adding the words "by Claude" to it doesn't materially change it.
       | One could also pay a few humans to do the same thing. People have
       | done that for decades.
        
         | drob518 wrote:
         | Right, but what is interesting is that you can buy it off the
         | rack for the price of tokens. You don't have to do a specialist
         | search for a security expert, pay a recruiter, hire them, wait
         | for the specialist to start, pay them a signing bonus, pay them
         | an expert-level salary, pay their social security taxes,
         | healthcare benefits, and finally pay for an exit package when
         | you lay them off because the project got canceled. You buy
         | tokens when you need them and you stop buying when you don't.
         | This was the same dynamic that made cloud computing more
         | interesting than company-owned servers in a company-owned data
         | center. It's more responsive to business needs and it falls
         | under the development expense budget, not payroll, so you can
         | do it even during hiring freezes.
        
           | tracker1 wrote:
           | But, you do have to have at least an employee or contractor
           | skilled enough to actually understand the scope of a given
           | bug report from the agent in order to determine validity.
           | I've seen plenty of legit bug reports by humans get dismissed
           | because the reviewer didn't understand the material impact or
           | how the bug/exploit worked.
        
             | drob518 wrote:
             | Yep, sure. So, maybe you hire one and not three. The point
             | is, it's going to be fewer. Of course, all that assumes the
             | AI is actually as good as a human, which I'm still
             | skeptical of.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | This is the weirdest take I've seen.
         | 
         | It takes humans a very long time to learn how to code/find
         | bugs. You just can't take any human and have them do it in a
         | reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of money.
         | 
         | Claude is effectively automation, once you have the hardware
         | you can run as many copies of the model as you want. Factories
         | can build hardware far faster then they can train more people.
         | 
         | It's weird to see a denial of the industrial revolution on HN.
        
           | alex_young wrote:
           | A bit uncharitable no?
           | 
           | I'm not denying that LLMs can be used to improve security
           | research, suggesting that their use is wrong or anything like
           | that.
           | 
           | Humans have used software to research security for a long
           | time. AI driven SAST is clearly going to help improve
           | productivity.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | Quantity is a quality.
             | 
             | Humans burned stuff for a very long time now, it's when we
             | started burning coal in mass industrially that the global
             | environmental impacts started stacking up to the point of
             | considerable damage.
        
               | i_think_so wrote:
               | Ahem. Let's please don't go off into areas outside of the
               | topic and end up repeating political talking points from
               | people with agendas.
               | 
               | Coal, even a home coal fired boiler of the 1940s vintage,
               | is just about as clean as solar, when compared to open
               | cooking fires burning dung, which is the "most popular"
               | method of harnessing combustion on Earth, measured per
               | ton over per capita. Even going from wood to coal is a
               | huge step up in pollution reduction compared to old
               | school methods of burning randomly sourced trees. (Your
               | rocket heater doesn't count. That wasn't even a twinkle
               | in an inventor's eye when coal started to become
               | popular.)
               | 
               | Source: did my senior P-chem work on smog. Then saw the
               | theory made manifest (in a way that no amount of
               | schoolwork could possibly replace) by looking at
               | particulate build-up on a glacier with my own eyeballs.
               | Pollution you can _see_ , and _hold in your hand_ will
               | make this more clear than any amount of chart and graph
               | reading about PM2.5 this and that.
               | 
               | Also: I hate that I had to self-censor my use of emdashes
               | because I don't want my lived experiences to get flagged
               | as chatbot slop. Grrr.
        
           | tracker1 wrote:
           | You still need people in the mix that understand the scope,
           | scale and impact of the exploits/bugs found. Just letting
           | agents go wild is how you get slop over time... You can
           | probably get away without them to an extent, but I'd suggest
           | that you're likely to increase the risk of errors and
           | misbehavior in practice over time by not checking agent work.
           | 
           | Even checking human work is often a shortcoming of processes
           | in practice.
        
         | Glemllksdf wrote:
         | It reduces the cost significantly.
         | 
         | A good security expert earns how much per year? And that person
         | works 8/5.
         | 
         | Now you can just throw money at it.
         | 
         | CIA and co pay for sure more than 20k (thats what the anthropic
         | red team stated as a cost for a complex exploit) for a zero
         | day.
         | 
         | If someone builds some framework around this, you can literaly
         | copy and paste it, throw money at it and scale it. This is not
         | possible with a human.
        
           | eikenberry wrote:
           | > It reduces the cost significantly.
           | 
           | > Now you can just throw money at it.
           | 
           | What happens when you throw enough money at it that it raises
           | the cost significantly.
        
             | Glemllksdf wrote:
             | But thats the thing, its already competitive and its not
             | even released.
             | 
             | CIA and FBI and states easily pay 100k for a zero day.
             | 
             | Plenty of companies have security expert staff on file.
             | 
             | And it will become cheaper and easyer to use, fast.
        
             | i_think_so wrote:
             | _chef 's kiss_
             | 
             | Logged in just to show some love. +1 for the economics. +1
             | again (if I could) for the truth-to-power.
             | 
             | We need a lot more of this kind of multi-disciplinary
             | skepticism to counterbalance the industrial grade rockstar
             | ninja 10x Kool-Aid drinking.
        
       | dwa3592 wrote:
       | Fighting over analogies is kind of pointless imo, but if you want
       | me to indulge, here is what I will ask: Do you consider breadth
       | first search better or depth first search better? - the good
       | answer is it depends on the search surface. The same way bugs,
       | vulnerabilities are hiding somewhere on the surface or
       | inside(exploiting dependencies) the surface of the software.
       | 
       | In conclusion - Having a lot of tokens help! Having a better
       | model also helps. Having both helps a lot. Having very
       | intelligent humans + a lot of tokens + the best frontier models
       | will help the most (emphasis on intelligent human).
        
         | kang wrote:
         | maybe a human knowledgeable in the domain (the training) is
         | better than a smart liguist-programmer.
        
       | rakejake wrote:
       | >> Test it yourself, GPT 120B OSS is cheap and available. BTW,
       | this is why with this bug, the stronger the model you pick (but
       | not enough to discover the true bug), the less likely it is it
       | will claim there is a bug.
       | 
       | I guess this is the crux of the debate. All the claims are
       | comparing models that are available freely with a model that is
       | available only to limited customers (Mythos). The problem here is
       | with the phrase "better model". Better how? Is it trained
       | specifically on cybersecurity? Is it simply a large model with a
       | higher token/thinking budget? Is it a better harness/scaffold? Is
       | it simply a better prompt?
       | 
       | I don't doubt that some models are stronger that other models (a
       | Gemini Pro or a Claude Opus has more parameters, higher context
       | sizes and probably trained for longer and on more data than their
       | smaller counterparts (Flash and Sonnet respectively).
       | 
       | Unless we know the exact experimental setup (which in this case
       | is impossible because Mythos is completely closed off and not
       | even accessible via API), all of this is hand wavy. Anthropic is
       | definitely not going to reveal their setup because whether or not
       | there is any secret sauce, there is more value to letting
       | people's imaginations fly and the marketing machine work.
       | Anthropic must be jumping with joy at all the free publicity they
       | are getting.
        
         | solenoid0937 wrote:
         | Mythos isn't restricted for marketing purposes - that would be
         | incredibly dumb because Anthropic would be giving up first
         | mover advantage for next gen models.
         | 
         | It's restricted because it's genuinely good at finding
         | vulnerabilities, and employees felt that it's not a good idea
         | to give this capability to everyone without letting defenders
         | front-run.
         | 
         | That's it. That's all there is to it. It is not some grand
         | marketing play.
        
           | rakejake wrote:
           | Sure, I am not precluding the possibility that they've
           | trained a genuinely great model. All I am saying is that the
           | "this model better than that model" is moot when on one side
           | you have model weights, and on the other side a whitepaper
           | and some accompanying comments on the danger.
           | 
           | I'm not that old but have been here long enough that I
           | remember when GPT-3 was considered too dangerous to release.
           | Now you have models 10x as good, 1/10th the size and run on
           | 8GB VRAM.
        
           | 2983592 wrote:
           | How do you know? If you have access you are not unbiased,
           | otherwise you cannot know by definition.
           | 
           | AI companies routinely claim that something is too dangerous
           | to release (I think GPT-2 was the first case) for marketing
           | reasons. There are at least 10 documented high profile cases.
           | 
           | They keep it secret because they now sell to the MIC with
           | China and North Korea bullshit stories as well as to
           | companies who are invested in the AI hype themselves.
        
             | afthonos wrote:
             | > How do you know? If you have access you are not unbiased,
             | otherwise you cannot know by definition.
             | 
             | The platonic ideal of how to dismiss any argument by anyone
             | about anything.
        
             | SpicyLemonZest wrote:
             | GPT-2 was obviously too dangerous to release at the time!
             | It's OK-ish now, when the knowledge that AI can produce
             | arbitrary text is widely shared. It would have been a
             | disaster for scammers and phishers to get GPT-2 at a time
             | when almost everyone still assumed that large volumes of
             | detailed text proved there's a real human being on the
             | other end of the conversation.
        
               | jayd16 wrote:
               | And, as we all know, humans can't be scammers. They need
               | the robots to lie.
        
             | Glemllksdf wrote:
             | I prefer a more cautios approach than the musk style were
             | stuff gets fixed after.
             | 
             | And with gpt-2 the worry was mass emails a lot better and
             | more detailed and personal, social media campaigns etc.
             | 
             | How many bots are deployed today on X and influencing
             | democrazy around the globe?
             | 
             | Its fair to say it had an impact and LLMs still have.
        
           | the_snooze wrote:
           | >It's restricted because it's genuinely good at finding
           | vulnerabilities, and employees felt that it's not a good idea
           | to give this capability to everyone without letting defenders
           | front-run.
           | 
           | It's a possibility, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility
           | that it's hype. If these claims were indeed serious, they
           | would submit it for independent analysis somewhere.
           | 
           | This isn't some crazy process. Defense contractors are
           | required to submit their systems (secret sauce and all) for
           | operational test and evaluation before they're fielded.
        
             | afthonos wrote:
             | > If these claims were indeed serious, they would submit it
             | for independent analysis somewhere.
             | 
             | They have. 40 different companies that have all committed
             | resources to patching their systems based on
             | vulnerabilities found by Mythos. One of them, Google, is a
             | frontier AI lab that pointedly did _not_ say that their own
             | models have found similar vulnerabilities.
             | 
             | > Defense contractors are required to submit their systems
             | (secret sauce and all) for operational test and evaluation
             | before they're fielded.
             | 
             | Does this look something like having 40 separate companies
             | look at the outputs of the system, deciding that it's real
             | and they should do something about it, and committing
             | resources to it?
             | 
             | At some point, "cynicism" is another word for "lalala can't
             | hear you".
        
               | jerf wrote:
               | Another cross-check I've run is, are the claims Anthropic
               | is making for Mythos that out of line with the current
               | status of AI coding assistents?
               | 
               | To which my answer is clearly, no, not even remotely. If
               | Anthropic is outright lying about what Mythos can do,
               | someone else will have it in a year.
               | 
               | In fact the security world would have to seriously
               | consider the possibility that even if Mythos didn't exist
               | that nation states have the equivalent in hand already.
               | And of course, if Mythos does exist, nation states have
               | it now. The odds that Antropic (and every other AI
               | vendor) isn't penetrated enough by every major
               | intelligence agency such that they have access to their
               | choice of model approach zero.
               | 
               | I wonder about the overlap between people being skeptical
               | of Mythos' capabilities, and those who are too skeptical
               | of AI to have spent any time with it because they assume
               | it can't be any good. If you are not aware of what
               | frontier models routinely do, you may not realize that
               | Mythos is just an evolution of existing capabilities, not
               | a revolution. Even just taking a publicly-available
               | frontier model, pointing it at a code base and telling it
               | to "find the vulnerabilities and write exploits" produces
               | disturbingly good results. I can see the weaknesses
               | referenced by the Mythos numbers, especially around the
               | actual writing of the exploits, but it's not like the
               | current frontier models fall on their face and
               | hallucinate wildly for this task. Most everything they
               | produce when I try this is at least a "yeah, that's worth
               | thinking about" rather than an instant dismissal.
        
           | zzzeek wrote:
           | it seems likely it's both a better model to some unknown
           | extent _and_ doing this  "we have to give it to the defenders
           | first" thing is super great marketing material. it seems an
           | entirely natural marketing campaign "announce that we can't
           | even give the model to everyone at first, it's so great!",
           | plus there's some truth to it, even better.
           | 
           | unless you are an employee at anthropic and shouldn't be
           | talking about any of this at all, there's no way to know what
           | the model's capabilities are.
        
           | frank-romita wrote:
           | Or, They created the illusion that it's restricted for
           | security reasons but in reality they just lack the necessary
           | for this to be used widespread!
        
           | jayd16 wrote:
           | If it wasn't marketing it wouldn't have fancy branding... It
           | wouldn't even be announced.
        
           | louiereederson wrote:
           | I don't think you can say this with confidence, outside-in.
           | It's not just about safety. The additional unknown is cost -
           | I don't just mean API cost, but fully loaded cost for a given
           | task. Is the model cost effective for tasks such that it has
           | product market fit?
           | 
           | We don't yet know if Mythos was a level shift in the
           | capability/cost frontier, or a continued extension of the
           | same logarithmic capability/cost curve.
        
             | solenoid0937 wrote:
             | Some people have access to the model for red team purposes
             | as part of Glasswing and they came away quite spooked
             | according to what I heard
        
               | louiereederson wrote:
               | I don't doubt it, I just mean the decision to release/not
               | release generally may also be informed by the
               | commercial/economic viability of the model for general
               | usage patterns versus extremely high value patterns like
               | vulnerability assessment
        
         | antirez wrote:
         | In the Anthropic Mythos model cards they _explicitly_ remarked
         | that they didn 't want Mythos to be specifically good at
         | security. They trained it to be good at coding, and as a side
         | effect the model is (obviously) good at security. This what
         | happens with flesh hackers too, mostly. Hackers are very good
         | programmers, as a side effect they understand systems well
         | enough that their understanding has security implications.
        
           | Hendrikto wrote:
           | Model cards are just marketing material. I wouldn't trust
           | them one bit.
        
             | 2983592 wrote:
             | But they are treated as holy scripture ...
        
             | Yokohiii wrote:
             | The whole discussion started out as an attempt to
             | disprove/verify anthropics (model card) claims.
             | 
             | He also transfers the logic of their claims to the actual
             | real world. You can say that model cards are marketing
             | garbage. You have to prove that experienced programmers are
             | not significantly better at security.
        
               | root_axis wrote:
               | > _You have to prove that experienced programmers are not
               | significantly better at security._
               | 
               | That has not been my experience. It's true that they are
               | "better at security" in the sense that they know to avoid
               | common security pitfalls like unparamaterized SQL, but
               | essentially none of them have the ability to apply their
               | knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in arbitrary
               | systems.
        
               | inetknght wrote:
               | > _essentially none of them have the ability to apply
               | their knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in arbitrary
               | systems._
               | 
               | I've found it to be the opposite. Many of them _do_ have
               | the ability to apply their knowledge in that fashion.
               | They 're just either not incentivised to do so, or
               | incentivised to not do so.
        
               | Yokohiii wrote:
               | An expert level human doesn't have to be expert at every
               | programming category. A webdev wouldn't spot a use after
               | free. A systems engineer wouldn't know about CSRF. That
               | is if both don't research security beyond their field.
               | Requiring a programmer to apply their knowledge to an
               | arbitrary system is asking too much. On the other hand
               | and LLM can be expert level in every programming field,
               | able to spot and combine vulnerabilities creatively. That
               | is all pretty hard and I don't think an security expert
               | with vast knowledge would say "that's easy".
               | 
               | My point is that more experienced programmers are better
               | at security on average, not that they are security
               | experts.
        
               | tracker1 wrote:
               | I would think pwn2own competitions would signal the
               | opposite. I'm consistently and often amazed at how a
               | unique combination of exploits can bring a larger exploit
               | and often in ways that most wouldn't even consider. I
               | think it takes a level of knowledge, experience,
               | creativity and paranoia to be really good with security
               | issues all around as a person.
        
             | mbesto wrote:
             | And overfitting benchmarks can easily be gamed. Yet here we
             | are with the top HN comment on the HN Mythos thread
             | outlining it's benchmarking performance gains.
             | 
             | I guess we'll never learn.
        
             | antirez wrote:
             | You don't need to trust anyone. GPT 5.4 xhigh is available
             | and you can test it for $20, to verify it is actually able
             | to find complex bugs in old codebases. Do the work instead
             | of denying AI can do certain things. It's a matter of an
             | afternoon. Or, trust the people that did this work. See my
             | YouTube video where I find tons of Redis bugs with GPT 5.4.
        
               | Hendrikto wrote:
               | I did not claim or deny anything. You cited the model
               | card, I just pointed out that this is no reliable source.
               | If you have better sources, like your YT video, you
               | should cite those instead.
        
               | otterley wrote:
               | You are claiming something: that the model card is not
               | reliable, therefore it's as useful as nothing. Sowing
               | doubt without a possible solution adds little value to
               | the conversation. Moreover, your rebuttal is
               | unsubstantiated.
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | Guys, think about all the security vulnerabilities you're
               | aware of; now, think about how many of those you know how
               | to technically reproduce. Now imagine that you actually
               | don't know how to reproduce most things and you're never
               | actually be able to judge the result.
               | 
               | Well, just cause these are all AI people doesn't mean
               | they verified enough of the output of these models to
               | actually provide the significant security implications
               | they're advertising.
        
           | rakejake wrote:
           | >>> the model is (obviously) good at security
           | 
           | Out of curiosity, are you one of the people who has access to
           | the model? If yes, could you write about _your_ experimental
           | setup in more detail?
        
           | zahlman wrote:
           | > Hackers are very good programmers
           | 
           | This does not match my experience.
        
             | ang_cire wrote:
             | The missing part of their _intended_ meaning is  "skilled
             | hackers". Unskilled hackers are everywhere, and they're bad
             | at programming, but so are unskilled programmers.
        
         | Glemllksdf wrote:
         | If its really more expensive per token, it might have more
         | parameters and is then able to hold more context/scope of code.
         | 
         | Rumors say it has 10 trillion parameter vs. 1 trillion.
        
       | csmantle wrote:
       | > _So, cyber security of tomorrow will not be like proof of work
       | in the sense of "more GPU wins"; instead, better models, and
       | faster access to such models, will win._
       | 
       | It's not proof of work, but proof of financial capacity.
       | 
       | The big companies are turning the access to high-quality token
       | generators (through their service) into means of production.
       | We're all going direct to Utopia, we're all going direct the
       | other way.
        
         | tptacek wrote:
         | There's no "proof" involved. That's the problem with the
         | analogy. It's not about how much "financial capacity" you have.
         | It's about how many bugs you find or fix. The bugs are there
         | where the models help attackers/defenders or not.
        
       | gobdovan wrote:
       | Now two popular articles argue about if cybersecurity can be seen
       | as proof of work.
       | 
       | Interestingly enough, I was thinking of writing an article about
       | how cybersecurity (both access models and operational
       | assumptions) can be modeled as a proof (NOT proof of work)
       | system. By that I mean there is an abstract model with a set of
       | assumptions (policies, identities, invariants, configurations and
       | implementation constraints) from which authorization decisions
       | are derived.
       | 
       | A model is secure if no unauthorized action is derivable.
       | 
       | A system is correct if its implementation conforms to the model's
       | assumptions.
       | 
       | A security model can be analyzed operationally by how likely its
       | assumptions are to hold in practice.
        
       | douglaswlance wrote:
       | you get better models with more compute.
       | 
       | its not just PoW at inference. It's PoW of inference + training.
        
       | riteshkew1001 wrote:
       | 'Calling AI vuln-finding 'hallucination plus luck' is generous, a
       | lot of human pentesting fits the same description.
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | This just proves that we should stop using old environments and
       | operating systems for mission-critical work, and build a
       | completely new environment from the ground up, that's secure by
       | default. Instead of trying to fix leaky buckets.
        
       | ramoz wrote:
       | > So, cyber security of tomorrow will not be like proof of work
       | in the sense of "more GPU wins"; instead, better models, and
       | faster access to such models, will win
       | 
       | tomato, tomato
        
         | TZubiri wrote:
         | So kind of like how you would get nowhere by buying more gpus
         | if there's already ASICs in play.
        
       | slopinthebag wrote:
       | > Don't trust who says that weak models can find the OpenBSD SACK
       | bug. I tried it myself.
       | 
       | This is exactly the argument AI skeptics make btw. Also you say
       | you tried GPT 120B OSS, that's like me proclaiming LLM coding
       | doesn't work because I tried putting gpt 3.5 in Claude Code. Try
       | it with GLM 5, Qwen, etc. Or improve your harness :)
        
       | kang wrote:
       | The proof-of-work in ai(llm) 'can be' from the training side (not
       | the inference side this blog explores) if a hashcash like 'proof'
       | of model having being trained was defined. It should be possible
       | to do so, since the very least measure of model having gotten
       | smarter with some additional data, is that it will
       | recognize/infer the said additional data correctly.
        
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