The beginning of the end of proprietary hardware drivers?

This looked impressive, but I was a bit skeptical. Obviously LLMs have gone far in the past year or so, but surely something like this would require the sorts of cybersecurity guardrails that exist on public models to be disabled? Something like this working though would be incredible for projects like PostmarketOS. So I decided to try and reproduce it, on a T2 MacBook Pro I have lying around.

It only took a few hours and a few manual reboots on my part for it to have come up with something that looked like it worked. This included one theory it had whereby it got files from my macOS install and immediately unsafe rebooted it so it couldn't clean up the secure enclave session.

However, it was immediately apparent it had just figured out how to register something had pressed on the fingerprint scanner, and it would accept anything from my actual finger to the side of my hand.

So, I told it what had happened and it soon went off debugging, writing new kernel drivers and such like.

After a few false starts, including the agent wiping my fingerprints :( it managed to get it working after around 250m tokens. The POC is here: https://github.com/jmurth1234/t2-touchid-linux. Note that it only works with existing enrolled fingerprints for now.

So what now?

I probably won't be working on this more myself. I don't use this laptop much at all. However, we are getting increasingly close to a world where we can keep old hardware going much more easily. The open source movement was founded in part by proprietary drivers locking down hardware. Will LLMs usher in a new age of preventing hardware going to landfill? I hope so.