> Isolated the relevant code

I mean isn't that most of it? If you put a snippet of code in front of me and said "there's probably a vulnerability here" I could probably spend a few hours (a much lower METR time!) and find it. It's a whole other ballgame to ask me with no context to come up with an exploit.

Sure. But it’s a computer. You can run “there’s probably a vulnerability here” as many times as you like. And it’s easier and cheaper to run it many times with a small open model than a big frontier model.

It also sounds like that is how mythos works too. Which makes sense - the linux kernel is too big to fit in context

No, it sounds like mythos is just doing parallel trajectories. that's pretty distinct!