I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes (www.xda-developers.com)

Qwen 3.8 27B, an advanced local AI model, recently demonstrated its impressive capabilities by successfully reverse-engineering a commercial app's license verification system in just 30 minutes. Operating entirely offline on a consumer workstation equipped with Nvidia’s Grace chip, it utilized a mix of sophisticated speculative decoding methods that achieved around 50 tokens per second. The process involved static analysis, where Qwen disassembled thousands of lines of code to reconstruct a public key hidden within the app, ultimately producing a working authentication bypass. This remarkable feat marked a significant milestone for local AI models, challenging the perception of where such advanced capabilities can reside. The implications for the AI and machine learning community are profound. Qwen’s ability to perform complex tasks like reverse-engineering with no cloud assistance illustrates the rapid advancement of local models, making powerful tools more accessible than ever. This capability raises both exciting opportunities for software analysis and cybersecurity as well as ethical concerns regarding potential misuse. While the results may vary across different applications, the demonstration reinforces that consumer-grade models can now tackle tasks previously thought to require elite-level infrastructure, reshaping the landscape of software auditing and threat modeling.