[adrian_b]

Anthropic themselves have explained that the harness for Mythos has a very important role in finding the vulnerabilities, because the model does not start from scratch, but the harness runs the model many times on each file of the code base, with different prompts, where the prompts evolve depending on the results of the previous runs.

First with more generic prompts, to determine whether it is worthwhile to do a detailed analysis of that file, then with more specific prompts to identify the bugs, and eventually with a prompt that requests a confirmation that a given bug/vulnerability exists.

For a proper comparison between some other model and Mythos, you also need such a complex harness. If you just tell to an LLM "find the bugs", and it does not find a vulnerability known to have been found by Mythos, that is a totally invalid comparison.

The final results provided by Mythos, like a PoC exploit or a patch, are also generated with a prompt that points to the exact code that has the vulnerability (which is supposed to exist based on the results of the previous runs).

[loeg]

My take from the SCW interview is that the Mythos harness isn't all that important and the author thought it would be even less important with future models. But maybe I misremember.

[bitexploder]

Anthropic has a vested interest in downplaying the harness relevance. In my experience harness really matters. More capable models are great, but current models are enough if you put some engineering effort into the harness.

[CaveTech]

The harness does not matter that much, it's getting leaner every cycle.

[bitexploder]

But a good harness lowers the model floor and accessibility and makes stronger models that much better.