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Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...

Is this a bit like slime moulds solving mazes? It looks considered but actual fact it’s just brute force approaches until it find the next successful step?

no

Its not brute force, its A*, but A* still isn't cognitive and doesn't understand what any of its output means in the slightest, nor does it have goals

Does that matter though? We have automated systems that can solve extremely complicated problems now. Personally I don't care if they "understand" what they are doing - what's interesting to me is the results

"extremely complicated" ehhhhh, A* isn't solving anything complicated, just parallel. Its actually extremely simple, just a lot of simple things. Metasploit is already an automated system that can solve extremely complicated problems.

The results here are not novel, other than the sandbox authors being incompetent.

Every time a new UI appears on top of the same underlying transformer, people ask if it’s truly novel. Why do we keep treating superficial wrappers as game changing architecture?

I shouldn’t even respond, but I’ll just say there is some space between game-changing architecture and superficial wrapper

btw are you a person or a bot

Do you evaluate this one as "not novel" too? www.anthropic.com/research/dis...

If my fuzzer manages to find a vulnerability does it mean its an amazing breakthrough in computer science? Its an efficient fuzzer but its not a thinking machine and so will always hit significant limitations. Its already hit massive diminishing returns, this may be the peak for this tech.

If your fuzzer found the weaknesses in that article then yes, I would categorize it as an impressive breakthrough in computer science I don't think categorizing LLMs as "thinking machines" or not is the interesting thing here

Why are you reposting the same link I replied to? You think I didn't read it? Jesus christ, you're so busy being smug you can't see that you're being naive.

You're rude

You started it. "it must take significant mental effort" was not a good faith comment.