a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin and Stanford's Dan Boneh on how AI's math leap could turn a decade of trust-building in cryptography into one month: Eddy: "We specifically rely in some sense on time... We put these schemes out and we wait. And we wait because what we believe is happening is that experts, like cryptographers and mathematicians, are testing and trying to break these things." "Because of the pace of progress on AI's mathematical abilities, there is a conspicuous absence of time... A whole new well of cognitive ability to scrutinize has appeared." Dan: "In the past, when someone would make an assumption and build a system based on it, we'd have to wait like 10 years before that system could be deployed." "Now we can just let a model run for a month, try to break it, and if the model can't break it, boy, do we have a lot of confidence that the assumption is valid." Eddy: "The labs can say, 'We took our tip-top, totally unrestricted, most cyber-capable model, and we told it to go absolutely insane, and we spent $20 million, $50 million trying to break this scheme.'" "We actually have the prospect to have more confidence in our security than ever before." @eddylazzarin @danboneh