Which it did by doing an inefficient version of the aforementioned 1940s algorithm.

Essentially modern LLMs are able to do normal AI engineering tasks, like running optimization algorithms over weights. The media has been inaccurately describing this as if the AI had some special insight into the weights, when it reality it just performed the tasks a human engineer might do.

That's not what's being described here; that's described in another paper that this is a followup to.