Cool project, but they really could have skipped the mention of clean room. Something trained on every copyrighted thing known to mankind is the opposite of clean room
We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
121–130 of 787 posts
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#122How about we get the LLM's to collaborate and design a perfect programming language for LLM coding, it would be terse (less tokens) easy for pattern searches etc and very fast to build, iterate over.
what about APL et al (BQN), information dense(?)
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#123This is a much more reasonable take than the cursor-browser thing. A few things that make it pretty impressive: > This was a clean-room implementation (Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development); it depends only on the Rust standard library. The 100,000-line compiler can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. It can also compile QEMU, FFmpeg, SQlite, postgres, redis > I started by draf…
The result is hardly a clean room implementation. It was rather a brute force attempt to decompress fuzzily stored knowledge contained within the network and it required close steering (using a big suite of tests) to get a reasonable approximation to the desired output. The compression and storage happened during the LLM training. Prove this statement wrong.
Nobody disputes that the LLM was drawing on knowledge in its training data. Obviously it was! But you'll need to be a bit more specific with your critique, because there is a whole spectrum of interpretations, from "it just decompressed fuzzily-stored code verbatim from the internet" (obviously wrong, since the Rust-based C compiler it wrote doesn't exist on the internet) all the way to "it used general knowledge from its training about compiler architecture and x86 and the C language."
Your post is phrased like it's a two sentence slam-dunk refutation of Anthropic's claims. I don't think it is, and I'm not even clear on what you're claiming precisely except that LLMs use knowledge acquired during training, which we all agree on here.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
We all saw verbatim copies in the early LLMs. They "fixed" it by implementing filters that trigger rewrites on blatant copyright infringement. It is a research topic for heaven's sake: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16046
We saw partial copies of large or rare documents, and full copies of smaller widely-reproduced documents, not full copies of everything. An e.g. 1 trillion parameter model is not a lossless copy of a ten-petabyte slice of plain text from the internet. The distinction may not have mattered for copyright laws if things had gone down differently, but the gap between "blurry JPEG of the internet" and "learned stuff" is m…
We are here in a clean room implementation thread, and verbatim copies of entire works are irrelevant to that topic.
It is enough to have read even parts of a work for something to be considered a derivative.
I would also argue that language models who need gargantuan amounts of training material in order to work by definition can only output derivative works.
It does not help that certain people in this thread (not you) edit their comments to backpedal and make the followup comments look illogical, but that is in line with their sleazy post-LLM behavior.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#125Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLM does not contain a verbatim copy of whatever it saw during the pre-training stage, it may remember certain over-represented parts, otherwise it has a knowledge about a lot of things but such knowledge, while about a huge amount of topics, is similar to the way you could remember things you know very well. And, indeed, if you give it access to internet or the source code of GCC and other compilers, it will imp…
We all saw verbatim copies in the early LLMs. They "fixed" it by implementing filters that trigger rewrites on blatant copyright infringement. It is a research topic for heaven's sake: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16046
The point is that it's a probabilistic knowledge manifold, not a database.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#127https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1
Thank you. That was a long article that started with a claim that was backed up by no proof, dismissing it as not the most interesting thing they were talking about when in fact it's the baseline of the whole discussion.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#128https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1
AI is the future.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI companies set that expectation when their CEOs ran around telling anyone who would listen that their product is a generational paradigm shift that will completely restructure both labor markets and human cognition itself. There is no nuance in their own PR, so why should they benefit from any when their product can't meet those expectations?
Because it leads to poor and nonconstructive discourse that doesn't educate anyone about the implications of the tech, which is expected on social media but has annoyingly leaked to Hacker News. There's been more than enough drive-by comments from new accounts/green names even in this HN submission alone.
It does lead to poor non-constructive discourse. That's why we keep calling those CEOs to task on it. Why are you not?
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#130They should add this to the benchmark suite, and create a custom eval for how good the resulting compiler is, as well as how maintainable the source code.