- My experience isn't unique. Social media is flooded with stories of similar superhuman reverse engineering feats by frontier models. For example, someone has created a replacement OS for Rigol gear (oscilloscopes, etc) using AI [1]. Is all of this just in the training data?
- Watching Claude work, he seemed to be going through the motions of actually reverse engineering it. First he dumped the ROM, disassembled it, and identified undocumented opcodes. He created many test programs to probe the various memory areas. It all struck me as very meticulous.
Now none of that is incompatible with the idea that some of this was already in the training data. But I guess I want to push back on this urge to always come up with a reason for why the AI isn't actually as good as it seems. At this point I think we need to face the fact that human programmers are already being eclipsed. Yes, it terrifies me.