If you don’t care about almost undetectable persistence, then yeah you won’t need to bother with LLMs to find the perfect hook point.
In order to emulate the firmware update process, you would need to reverse engineer a large portion of the binary, right? This is where LLMs would be helpful.
How would you achieve it with the LLM? I’m totally confused what persistent malware had to do with LLMs, unless you’re just saying “LLMs are smart and are a way to automatically do hard things”
Edit: if you mean that theoretically this may one day be possible for a LLM to automatically hook functions and introduce persistent malware, then, not being a future teller myself, I would likely agree with you. But that’s not interesting because you can say that about essentially anything.