One person with an AI agent cut Google's quantum ECDSA circuit cost 52%; crowd beat it in 73 hours
anselm · x · 2026-09-11
- Google QuantumAI published a zk proof that a quantum circuit breaking ECDSA signatures existed, without releasing the circuit; the community largely accepted it.
- One person, Gautham, pointed an AI agent at rebuilding it and alone cut the cost 52%.
- He then built a public evaluator and leaderboard (ECDSA.fail), opening the problem to everyone: a number theorist in Poznań, pseudonymous accounts, Trail of Bits, StarkWare and the Ethereum Foundation joined.
- Within 73 hours the crowd passed Google's reference point; by July it was >50% below it.
- The effort became an arXiv paper with 36 authors and 100+ contributors — a striking case of one person plus an agent catalyzing crowd-scale science.
More from AGI Musings
- DeepMind researcher: all of mathematics will soon be formalizable, with agents hunting proofs — ChrSzegedy · 2026-10-28
- AI reply bots are degrading X discourse, a 'Gresham's Law' for social replies — generativist · 2026-10-28
- Be prepared: your life's research problem could be solved by a stranger's idle AI prompt on a commute — fkasummer · 2026-10-28
- A fine-tuned 'cat obsession' control fools every AI welfare criterion — MirrorEthic_Anchor · 2026-10-28
- OpenAI researcher: frontier AI ideas can't be patched for safety after the fact — willdepue · 2026-10-28
- Big Short's Eisman: the whole market is now 'one trade' on AI — and it 'better succeed' — SumitGup · 2026-10-28