☢️You remember? Google optimized Shor's algorithm. The algorithm that breaks asymmetric cryptography (RSA, elliptic curves) once you have a quantum computer with enough Qubits.
The US government blocked the paper. So Google published a Zero Knowledge proof instead: a mathematical proof that they have the result, without revealing how. Cryptographic sorcery 🧙
But the Internet is sneaky. Someone launched a contest to re-discover the result with AI. The LLM searches a huge space of circuits (each one a candidate optimization of Shor's), and tests whether it beats the previous best. The clever part: they use the ZKP verifier as the reward function. No false positives, and it turns out to be a very efficient signal.
In less than 2 days, the community re-discovered Google's result !!!
🔔15 days later, the LLMs are still improving it. They're already 44% ahead of Google.
Hard to say where this stops, ie. what the true minimum quantum complexity for Shor's is. But we will not close the full gap. You still need a Quantum Computer with a relatively large number of qubits. The only thing that changed is that this number drops a little every day, and it has been dropping for 15 days straight.