I’m extremely impressed with anyone’s ability to do this at any age, but if I remember correctly, she’s like 17-19 years old or something? Incredible! You go Alyssa!
From what I remember from that age, it was the sweet spot for having the intelligence, the enthusiasm and the time to just grab a problem and completely loose myself in it. I didn't care at what time I slept, there were no children requiring attention, my bachelors was pretty easy and didn't require much time investment. My parents were also pretty easy and let me be at my computer for very long times at very strange hours.
It was a nice time for me to learn Linux, compile kernels, install Gentoo. For me this was about 2004 btw.
Ok, this is pretty next level and way cooler than what I did, but my point is that people at this age are not to be underestimated, they are smart AND have resource ;) (Note that I'm also not claiming that this is what is happening here, but it could be).
It’s not so much cognitive capability, but experience and knowledge. This is well beyond the experience and knowledge of many professional senior software engineers, let alone someone who hasn’t actively worked at NVIDIA/etc on video chips. She’s figured all this out on her own — not even a full CS degree at a top tier school would go into this level of detail to know how these chips & drivers work, let alone reverse engineer a cutting edge chip from a black box. Reverse engineering is its own skill set, and be the first in the world in this uncharted territory means this isn’t your first time reverse engineering something. It isn’t her first, which makes it even more impressive what she was doing at an earlier age. That combination of self-drive, knowledge, and talent is extremely rare… even more rare when her peers are wanting to hang out and do normal teen stuff!!!
Well, from what I've heard regarding the frontal cortex, adult decision making is fully crystallized on average around age 25. So it kind of makes sense why on average society these days doesn't trust kids with important stuff.
Though, you know, statistics. There are outliers :-)
It was a nice time for me to learn Linux, compile kernels, install Gentoo. For me this was about 2004 btw.
Ok, this is pretty next level and way cooler than what I did, but my point is that people at this age are not to be underestimated, they are smart AND have resource ;) (Note that I'm also not claiming that this is what is happening here, but it could be).