That's not really the point of the article IMO. It's more about how there's nothing magical that happens when my calculator does 347987987 x 55998. I could do it by hand too if I wanted, even if I wouldn't be nearly as fast. Yes, the calculator can do it much faster, for much longer and much more reliably, but there's nothing surprising about that.

The initial reporting/discussion surrounding these "LLMs understand LLM weights" made it sound as if these models had a superhuman ability to natively read and understand weights. Something that immediately seemed wild because I don't think that LLMs are trained to do that, so it would be an emergent ability.

If you look at the details though, it's fairly standard reverse-engineering: identify unique traits of the machine code you're looking at and make educated guesses as to what the code does, then use this understanding to unravel the next bit of code etc...