They're talking about chips, not transistors. The scale change would be roughly proportional.

> The burden of proof for such a extraordinary claim is on them

I was thinking of this comment when I responded, which already does explain how such a thing could be done.

But also I think this is sort of the point, super-human AIs could do extraordinary things. And if it is possible, then eventually it would be done.

Personally though my intuition is that AI that's is disconnected from the real world, just trained in abstract on text/video, will not be grounded enough to do these sorts of things on its own. It can generate outputs matching the training domain, sure, but you gotta let it explore like a baby with real-world interfaces for it to figure out how to re-purpose hardware etc. Basically I don't think it can really understand what it means to break out of the box while it's living completely inside the box. Parable of the cave and all that.

But at the same time if we actually did have a truly super-intelligent AI, I still wouldn't put it past it to figure out how to use physical characteristics of devices to communicate with the outside world.

Life... finds a way.

You didn't do anything to refute what they were saying, which was that it could make its own network adapter using the physical properties of other hardware it had access to.