This was done by an OpenAI subscriber, not an employee, so Astra would not have had access to OpenAI's massive compute for brute forcing. The scripts it wrote presumably ran on the computer of the customer. (ChatGPT can run scripts on OpenAI's servers, but it has a 45 second execution limit.)

> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.

I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?

> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.

It seems like a lot of the recent "breakthroughs" come down to this: spending millions of dollars in compute to solve problems that essentially amount to recreational math problems