We are talking about a guy still using mailing lists and patch files to conduct development on one of the largest codebases in the world, not exactly someone who jumps on any new shiny thing just to sound smart.
just to clarify, he’d not so much called LLMs “the new compilers” as he compared both to each other in a sense that an LLM is just another layer of analysis tooling between the developer and the final machine code, which, IMO, sounds much more reasonable than calling LLMs “the new compiler”.
I think it’s supposed to be that how AI turns high level instructions into code is compared to how compilers turn code into assembly. Implying that using AI is just a natural extension of the handing off work to the computers that we’ve already been doing.
I wonder if you gave different AI models some c++ or something and told them to write assembly based on it how well they would do compared to an actual compiler
With sufficient (usually stolen) training data they could probably do it to a state where it’s kinda usable in an assistive manner.
Though since these LLMs often struggle with anything that doesn’t exist in truly abhorrent abundance in its training data as well as the actual engineering part (i.e. structuring the code sensibly and consistently, which I’d wager is crutially important with Assembly to not end up with spaghetti) trying to have it generate something from scratch would probably end up in a huge mess.
What does that even mean. Whoever said that just uttered some empty but smart sounding catch phrase. Such is all the talk about the wonders of Ai
Linus Torvalds
Not exactly, but something along those lines.
We are talking about a guy still using mailing lists and patch files to conduct development on one of the largest codebases in the world, not exactly someone who jumps on any new shiny thing just to sound smart.
https://thenewstack.io/torvalds-ai-programming-productivity/
just to clarify, he’d not so much called LLMs “the new compilers” as he compared both to each other in a sense that an LLM is just another layer of analysis tooling between the developer and the final machine code, which, IMO, sounds much more reasonable than calling LLMs “the new compiler”.
I think it’s supposed to be that how AI turns high level instructions into code is compared to how compilers turn code into assembly. Implying that using AI is just a natural extension of the handing off work to the computers that we’ve already been doing.
I wonder if you gave different AI models some c++ or something and told them to write assembly based on it how well they would do compared to an actual compiler
I highly doubt they would manage to make AI spout out good assembly, they fuck up with high level code, imagine assembly
With sufficient (usually stolen) training data they could probably do it to a state where it’s kinda usable in an assistive manner.
Though since these LLMs often struggle with anything that doesn’t exist in truly abhorrent abundance in its training data as well as the actual engineering part (i.e. structuring the code sensibly and consistently, which I’d wager is crutially important with Assembly to not end up with spaghetti) trying to have it generate something from scratch would probably end up in a huge mess.
I think that nowdays we don’t even have enough people to produce enough assembly code to make AI ““learn”” how to write assembly