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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

> the insane rate of progress

Yeah but the speed of progress can never catch the speed of a moving goalpost!

What about the hype? If you claim your LLM generated compiler is functionally on par with GCC I’d expect it to match your claim.

I still won’t use it while it also matches all the non-functional requirements but you’re free to go and recompile all the software you use with it.

> Yeah but the speed of progress can never catch the speed of a moving goalpost!

How do you like those coast-to-coast self drives since the end of 2017?

Training data only teaches it how to reach the goalpost, not how to overtake it.

Are we sure about that? I mean, we have seen that LLMs are able to generalize to some degree. So I don't see a reason why you couldn't put an agent in a loop with a profiler and have it try to optimize the code. Will it come up with entirely novel ideas? Unlikely. Could it potentially combine existing ideas in interesting, novel ways that would lead to CCC outperforming GCC? I think so. Will it get stuck along the way? Almost certainly.

Would you want it to? The further the goal posts are the more progress we are making, and that's good, no? Trying to make it into a religious debate between believers and non-believers is silly. Neither side can predict the future, and, even if they could, winning the debate is not worth anything!

What is interesting is what can do with LLMs today and what we would like them to be able to do tomorrow so we can keep developing them into a good direction. Whether or not you (or I) believe it can do that thing tomorrow is thoroughly uninteresting.

The goalpost is not moving. The issue is that AI generates code that kinda looks ok but usually has deep issues, specially the more complex the code is. And that's not being really improved.

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