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points by tomaskafka 2 days ago | 0 comments

I feel this comment not getting enough attention and this seems like an appropriate place to quote:

> Somehow, their wide range of results touch every single area of math except anything touching cryptography. I think it's fair to expect that three letter agencies are given the ability to veto the publication of certain discoveries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256998

[–] dguest 2 days ago

Maybe because cryptography is funded better than the rest of math.

The big AI companies spend millions on some of these proofs (15M was one estimate for the Naiver-Stokes thing). Had anyone has spent millions on them before this? There was a 1M prize but that certainly wouldn't convince anyone to spend orders of magnitude more to solve the problem.

Meanwhile the three letter agencies are spending billions on cryptography. They have programs that recruit students starting in high school. So maybe they are sending the spooks to suppress OpenAI's cryptography breakthroughs, or maybe they just already outspent them.

That to me is the point that isn't getting enough attention: pure math isn't that well funded. I agree as much as anyone that these proofs are an unprecedented breakthrough for LLMs, but let's keep in mind that the money they are throwing around is also unprecedented.

[–] Davidzheng 2 days ago

Maybe it's arrogant to say as someone working in pure math but I highly doubt this is the cause

[–] dguest 1 day ago

What do you think the cause is?

I'm not trying to argue there is a single cause, either (sorry if my either-or phrasing implied that). I think attributing any general feature of an academic discipline to a single cause would be missing a dozen other contributing factors.

Of course three letter agencies are watching this carefully, and I'd believe they were weighing in somehow, as they have in cryptography in the past. My point was that we shouldn't ignore the overall sparsity of funding in pure math and science projects. A lot of (probably most) contributors to bleeding-edge research have a number of other jobs in their position.

[–] snowwrestler 2 days ago

I don’t think that’s fair, it does not usually work that way in private industry.

It’s possible they have major findings in crypto but are coordinating disclosure. The PHP bug was worked for months and only leaked a few hours early.

It’s also possible they have not found any major flaws yet. The math underlying major cryptography libraries is way simpler than these advanced proofs, and the implementations among the most scrutinized and hardened bits of code in the world.

The PHP bug paradoxically gave me hope. It was not magic; it was a logic flaw that was already known for years. And exploiting it has proved way more difficult than initially feared.

[–] paxy 2 days ago

This very proof we are discussing is at the very heart of cryptography. People have no idea what they are talking about.

[–] brookst 2 days ago

This is the “absence of evidence is proof of existence” mindset.

[–] tomaskafka 2 days ago

It is, but it is also how the Manhattan project became "visible" to intelligence community - scientists related to nuclear research stopped publishing papers.

[–] fxwin 2 days ago

it's not proof of existence, but it's suspicious unless there is a good reason why cryptography should be more immune to AI driven progress than other disciplines. If i knew an elephant had walked through my porcelain store, and miraculously all the blue cups survived intact while every other type of cup was smashed to pieces, I'd guess that someone took steps to preserve them.

[–] seizethecheese 2 days ago

I think the premise is interesting (that there are no breakthroughs in cryptography) but does not support the conclusion (that therefore three letter agencies are suppressing this).

I think the premise does support the conclusion that there's some mechanism suppressing release, though.

[–] dachtovyvse 2 days ago

I remember (if that is not a false memory) that Sarnak once expressed the opinion that factoring has polynomial complexity.

[–] baoooooooooooo 2 days ago

I think simple market forces explain the omission of any discoveries relating to cryptography, the labs have an obligation to at least build solutions and make them available before releasing findings.

If I were to start inferring what’s going on, it’s that findings in this space have relevance to breaking current weak cryptography.