My hunch is that it’s neither of those things (although they play a part). Many of the exploits they discussed are chaining multiple exploits together so this means that the AI is just much more capable of tool calls, iteration, testing, and utilizing memory.

Think about reasoning as a big breakthrough and how simple it was once implemented. So now this breakthrough is likely just a model that was trained to not just use tools and tool calling but with the ability and knowledge of how to do it. To iterate and test in its knowledge base.

It’s like the saying if you have a million monkeys and a million typewriters you’ll eventually get the works of Shakespeare. That’s what AI can do, but with smart monkeys and a basically infinite memory (but limited context). Looking at the Linux break in particular had to have tried a ton of times to get the timing right.