I think they're trying to avoid rewriting things for no reason though. The things being rewritten tend to have a history of security problems or other issues that would be cause for a rewrite even if it wasn't in Rust.
That ends up being "rewrite it in Rust" because new code includes changes to existing code. A nice thing about Rust is that you can generally rewrite things piecewise there's no need to switch everything at once.
There is some long term planning going on, but bad luck when sampling the next token can take the process out of rails, so it's not just an implementation detail.
A paper that says: "our approach is simpler than the state of the art". But also does not loudly say "our approach is significantly behind the state of the art on all metrics". Not easy to get published, but I guess putting it as a preprint with a big company's name will help...
It's cute that you think your high-school level cypher is probably not seen in the training set of one of the biggest LLMs in the world. Surely no one could have thought of such a cypher, let alone create exercises around it!
No one should ever make claims such as "X is not in <LLM>'s training set". You don't know. Even if your idea is indeed original, nothing prevents someone from having though of it before, and published it. The history of science is full of simultaneous discoveries, and we're talking cutting-edge research.
The point is not that the cypher is hard, the point is that the randomish string it needs to answer the question can’t possibly be computed just from correlations from the training data. Rather, it learned an emergent, generalizable skill that it used to solve it.
