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An AI like this can hold a hell of a lot more information in its head at one point than a human. Each decision it makes is based on way more context, it can manipulate the problem using much more information, much faster. The problem is that it can't think in abstractions.

If AI gets to the point where it has a reasonable understanding of the shape of the data & the basic spatial manipulations being applied (not far off IMO), I'd expect it to be waaaaaay better at discovering certain types of new algorithms than humans. It can handle thinking about algorithms that have millions of independently moving parts in a way a human can't.

Humans have the edge deriving algorithms that require a sequence of high-level steps on an abstraction. "Do this, then we get a thing, then we do some stuff to the thing, stretch it, squash it, massage it." AI sucks at that, it doesn't think in the same kind of flexible abstractions.

But imagine if you build an understanding of how the code will be compiled & how that will interact with the cache into the AI. That's very difficult for humans because you can't think about all those mechanics at once, we have to focus on one at a time. An AI that really gets it? I could see it writing a better sorting algorithm for a specific, complex datatype than a human could, or at the very least having the competetive edge because it can do it basically instantly.