- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cURL developer Daniel Stenberg has seen Anthropic’s Mythos, a model the AI biz has suggested is too capable at finding security holes to release publicly, scan his popular open source project. But after the system turned up just a single vulnerability, he concluded the hype around Mythos was “primarily marketing” rather than a major AI security breakthrough.
Stenberg explained in a Monday blog post that he was promised access to Anthropic’s Mythos model - sort of - through the AI biz’s Project Glasswing program. Part of Glasswing involves giving high-profile open source projects access via the Linux Foundation, but while Stenberg signed up to try Mythos, he said he never actually received direct access to the model. Instead, someone else with access ran Mythos against curl’s codebase and later sent him a report.
“It’s not that I would have a lot of time to explore lots of different prompts and doing deep dive adventures anyway,” Stenberg explained. “Getting the tool to generate a first proper scan and analysis would be great, whoever did it.”
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Or maybe they didn’t. Check this cross-post comment thread.
I replied there, sourcing the original blog post.
What they said: “Maybe slightly better, not significantly better than existing tools, at least in the context of this single project”. What The Register makes of that: “greatest marketing stunt ever”. They did reference marketing in one sentence, but it was nowhere near as extreme.
So… can we say: “Myth busted” ?
Not to discount the usefulness or complexity of curl in any way, but it’s not one of the larger codebases out there. It’s also pretty darned good. Firefox seems to have a very positive experience with Mythos, but they also had their own internal test harnesses from prior work, ready to utilize LLM analysis at scale. It was far more intensive than having a third party run something on their behalf and produce a report.
As far as i understand it, its not all hype. Its a little bit like having a really competent security researcher go deep through your complete codebase just really fast and with improved recall.
So no black magic, just stuff regular security reviews would find. Firefox is just a huge codebase and once a bug got past review it might stay there forever.
So this will be abused if released publicly sooner or later. This way is a little bit like responsible disclosure. This will make the initial wave hurt way less. And obviously it doesn’t hurt marketing.
Anybody working with software knows marketing people promise the world and understand nothing. Pretty sure they just heard “black magic” and ran with it.
Its a little bit like having a really competent security researcher go deep through your complete codebase just really fast and with improved recall.
I doubt that, more of a force multiplier for security researchers at this stage (perhaps always for LLMs without an architecture leap) IMO. Otherwise I generally agree. It’s responsible to take this approach perhaps, but mostly marketing. Still let’s not kid ourselves it isn’t happening at scale already. Plenty of open weights models can also force multiply a competent security researcher, either black or white hat. Mythos isn’t a quantum leap or anything, just 4.7.
Anybody working with software knows marketing people promise the world and understand nothing. Pretty sure they just heard “black magic” and ran with it.
Heh, yup.
Mozilla still hires competent engineers? I thought they had left years ago. After all, Firefox is terribly stale. What do they spend time doing? I can see them trying very hard to refine their prompts: “Claude, fix my bugs and do not make mistakes”.
Yes, sure, you have a huge software package with its own share of CVEs, you are used billions of times a day and likely have patched just about everything you can, and millions of users can … that’s exactly like every other software project on the planet, good job.
