> There likely won't be one Skynet, but rather multiple AI's, produced by various sponsors, starting out as relatively harmless autonomous agents in corporate competition with each other

This is kind of how Skynet begins in the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It takes place after the 2nd movie in an alternate timeline from the 3rd movie (and establishes itself how that's possible without contradiction).

Specific examples I remember: A chess machine for the brain, traffic light cameras for the eyes and ears, a repurposed factory to build the terminators themselves. The series is about the Connors getting information from the future and going on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming.

But then we return to the premise of the article, which is that LLM's struggle with higher level code that has fewer examples. C is much more repetitive and has millions of examples from decades of use.

Plus if we assume the bottle neck on skynet is physical materials and not processing power, a system written in C can theoretically always be superior to a system written in another language if we assume infinite time can be spent building it.