The flip side is that this might become a thing of the past for future hardware/firmware, if AI hardening becomes standard practice.

There’s no substitute for having open systems that aren’t cryptographically locked down by the manufacturer.

I think that this is not true -- the achievements mentioned here are hardly ground breaking and mostly build on work that was already done years before LLMs were a thing.

There are things that the "open source movement" dreams about, and one just has to search around... E.g. like codecs, Qualcomm's aptX lossless, adaptative, and other more recent variations.

Brings me a lot of joy to see these articles. They've inspired me to reverse engineer my laptop again.

Did the open source movement dream of outsourcing what they loved to do themselves for free, as in both beer and freedom, to products which are trained on the corpus of their own knowledge without any consent and sold by behemoth corporations on a subscription basis?

"only ever" feels like a stretch. Libratbag, QMK, OpenWRT, Nouveau and Asahi all took up the task without much or any AI help. They're not all just dreamers.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

There's a difference between the people sitting at the table and the mice scurrying around catching the crumbs. Freedom is sitting at the table. The OP, sadly, is catching the crumbs.