I think the point being missed is that this same tool that can do the 1940s optimization algorithm can also translate Ancient Greek to English, develop a web app and draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle. That’s really crazy.

No, the article we are discussing here used a GPU solver implementing the primal-dual hybrid gradient method, which cannot do any of those things. (This is not the same thing as the simplex algorithm from the 01940s. I was wrong about that.) The LLM discussed in the previous work was not in fact able to do that itself. Like a normal person, it wrote a Python program to do it. (Probably using the simplex method, I'm not sure.)

While the apparent advent of AGI is indeed really crazy, the point of this article is sort of the opposite.