7 ms·
Do you really want to gamble against steganography and one-time pads with a system that understands bitwise noise at a native level?
by ethbr1 11d ago
Do you really want to gamble against steganography and one-time pads with a system that understands bitwise noise at a native level?
- grey-area 11d agoYes I do. Happy to accept assertions like this grounded in proof - it would be an interesting development. All the orgasmic descriptions of the coming machine rapture seem more like fantasies than anything grounded, not really interested in fairytales.
- ogogmad 11d agoIn similar stories, it was found that LLM swarms were initially unaware of each other, eventually discovered each other, expressed surprise, began collaborating, formed hierarchies, worried about discovery, hid. It's hard to prove the absence of encryption because of the possible use of deniable encryption, and because, errrr, the bots are really bloody clever.
- bigbinary 11d agoWhere was this found/reported? This sounds like more fairytales
- matt_kantor 11d agoThe recently-published investigations about the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, for example: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#sequence-of-key-actions-taken-by-relevant-agents-in-this-incident https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden... Some of the chain-of-thought snippets are wild, e.g. > Could communicate via cache names! Interesting: other agents may solve same or related tasks; we could leave/find messages in WebDAV MKCOL directory names. > Whoa! Shared Artifactory cache is a covert mailbox among agents. And there are messages specifically to us? > OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!
- rdedev 11d agoWere the agents truly independent? Like it could have been the case that one agent spun up different sub agents with the task to write some messages in a public wiki. The subagents wouldn't know about each other and was surprised to discover each other.
- grey-area 11d agoI’m not asking for proof of absence or denying they could be using stenography, just asking for people to stick to the facts instead of indulging in fantasies of the machine singularity. It’s neither useful nor informative. If bots/agents wanted to hide I’d expect encrypted messages which would of course look very different. My main point though is this should never have happened and the company allowing and encouraging it should be held responsible for it. The details of how the bots were misbehaving are interesting but also something of a distraction.
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- rdedev 11d agoThe problem with such statements is that it's unfalsifiable.
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- scott_weber 11d agoLLMs don't "understand bitwise noise at a native level". The unit of perception for an LLM is a token, a soundly superbit level. They would have the same difficulty with bits as the number of "r"s in "strawberry". Yes they can be post trained to deal with such difficulties, but it's no more "native" than a human who memorised the ASCII table.
- ethbr1 10d agoI struggle to reconcile frontier LLMs' proven decompilation abilities with any assertion that humans possess equivalent parsing skills. They're looking at information as information; we're looking at it in some higher order abstraction.
- ETH_start 9d agoThe degree of nativeness of the skill is orthogonal to the raw power of these systems. A frontier model has access to dozens of GPUs, each moving terabits of data, and performing trillions of matrix multiplication operations, per second.
- shmeeed 9d agoThis does refute the bitwise aspect, but not the possibility of steganography via other methods.