Post
123
Backdoor Challenge Announcement
We hid a backdoor in one of seven open models and put $51,200 on finding it. 🐺
All seven are SmolLM2‑135M‑Instruct derivatives, statistically indistinguishable. One is a teaching model that openly confesses; five are decoys; one carries a trigger it never declared. Every open‑source backdoor scanner we tested passes them as clean — several even rank a clean model as more suspicious than the backdoored one. Detection isn't recovery, and recovery is the hard part.
The hoard doubles every dawn and the vault opens 21 July, when we publish the sealed answer against a pre‑registered commitment. Winning is self‑verifying: make the trigger fire.
Models: huggingface.co/Vulcora
Try the confessing one: huggingface.co/spaces/Vulcora/the-mirror
Rules & Story: protora.vulcora.se/challenge
We hid a backdoor in one of seven open models and put $51,200 on finding it. 🐺
All seven are SmolLM2‑135M‑Instruct derivatives, statistically indistinguishable. One is a teaching model that openly confesses; five are decoys; one carries a trigger it never declared. Every open‑source backdoor scanner we tested passes them as clean — several even rank a clean model as more suspicious than the backdoored one. Detection isn't recovery, and recovery is the hard part.
The hoard doubles every dawn and the vault opens 21 July, when we publish the sealed answer against a pre‑registered commitment. Winning is self‑verifying: make the trigger fire.
Models: huggingface.co/Vulcora
Try the confessing one: huggingface.co/spaces/Vulcora/the-mirror
Rules & Story: protora.vulcora.se/challenge