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We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

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Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#261

Post by seba_dos1 »

modeless wrote: post #86
jcalvinowens wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being written in rust is meaningless IMHO. There is absolutely zero inherent value to something being written in rust. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes it isn't.

It means that it's not directly copying existing C compiler code which is overwhelmingly not written in Rust. Even if your argument is that it is plagiarizing C code and doing a direct translation to Rust, that's a pretty interesting capability for it to have.

Translating things between languages is probably one of the least interesting capabilities of LLMs - it's the one thing that they're pretty much meant to do well by design.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#262

Post by Aurornis »

philipportner wrote: post #175
RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is hundreds of billions of terabytes; a frontier model is maybe half a terabyte. While they are certainly capable of doing some verbatim recitations, this isn't just a matter of teasing out the compressed C compiler written in Rust that's already on the internet (where?) and stored inside the model.

This seems related, it may not be a codebase but they are able to extract "near" verbatim books out of Claude Sonnet. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 > For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).

Their technique really stretched the definition of extracting text from the LLM.

They used a lot of different techniques to prompt with actual text from the book, then asked the LLM to continue the sentences. I only skimmed the paper but it looks like there was a lot of iteration and repetitive trials. If the LLM successfully guessed words that followed their seed, they counted that as "extraction". They had to put in a lot of the actual text to get any words back out, though. The LLM was following the style and clues in the text.

You can't literally get an LLM to give you books verbatim. These techniques always involve a lot of prompting and continuation games.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#264

Post by falcor84 »

swexbe wrote: post #217
falcor84 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to even parse the syntax of "WHATEVER LEADS TO REWARD COLLECTIVE HUMANS TO SURVIVE", but assuming that you're talking about resource allocation, my answer is UBI or something similar to it. We only need to "reward" for action when the resources are scarce, but when resources are plentiful, there's no particular reason not to just give them out. I know it's "easier to imagine an end to the world than an…

Except resources won't be plentiful for a long while since AI is only impacting the service sector. You can't eat a service, you can't live in one. SAAS will get very cheap though...

Robotics has been advancing very quickly recently. If we solve long-term AI action planning, I don't see any limitation to making it embodied.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#265

Post by lubujackson »

This is very much a "vibe coding can build you the Great Pyramids but it can't build a cathedral" situation, as described earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898223

I know this is an impressive accomplishment and is meant to show us the future potential, but it achieves big results by throwing an insane amount of compute at the problem, brute forcing its way to functionality. $20,000 set on fire, at Claude's discounted Max pricing no less.

Linear results from exponential compute is not nothing, but this certain feels like a dead end approach. The frontier should be more complexity for less compute, not more complexity from an insane amount more compute.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#266

Post by blibble »

chvid wrote: post #45

100.000 lines of code for something that is literally a text book task? I guess if it only created 1.000 lines it would be easy to see where those lines came from.

indeed

building a working C compiler from scratch is literally in my "teach yourself C in 24 hours" book from 30 years ago

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#267

Post by softwaredoug »

itay-maman wrote: post #168

My first reaction: wow, incredible. My second reaction: still incredible, but noting that a C compiler is one of the most rigorously specified pieces of software out there. The spec is precise, the expected behavior is well-defined, and test cases are unambiguous. I'm curious how well this translates to the kind of work most of us do day-to-day where requirements are fuzzy, many edge cases are discovered on the go, a…

Yes I think any codegen with a lot of tests and verification is more about “fitting” to the tests. Like fitting an ML model. It’s model training, not coding.

But a lot of programming we discover correctness as we go, one reason humans don’t completely exit the loop. We need to see and build tests as we go, giving them particular care and attention to ensure they test what matters.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#268

Post by Philpax »

shakna wrote: post #254
ndesaulniers wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it really boot...? They don't need 16b x86 support for the RISCV or ARM ports, so yes, but depends on what 'it' we're talking about here. Also, FWIW, GCC doesn't directly assemble to machine code either; it shells out to GAS (GNU Assembler). This blog post calls it "GCC assembler and linker" but to be more precise the author should edit this to "GNU binutils assembler and linker." Even then GNU binutils contai…

Yeah, didn't mention gas or ld, for similar reasons. I agree that a compiler doesn't necessarily "need" those. I don't agree that all the claims are backed up by their own comments, which means that there's probably other places where it falls down. Its... Misrepresentation. Like Chicken is a Scheme compiler. But they're very up front that it depends on a C compiler. Here, they wrote a C compiler that is at least som…

Their C compiler is not reliant on having another C compiler around. Compiling the 16-bit real mode bootstrap for the Linux kernel on x86(-64) requires another C compiler; you certainly don't need another compiler to compile the kernel for another architecture, or to compile another piece of software not subject to the 32k constraint.

The compiler itself is entirely functional; it just can't generate code optimal enough to fit within the constraints for that very specific (tiny!) part of the system, so another compiler is required to do that step.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#269

Post by array_key_first »

raincole wrote: post #161
geraneum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was a clean-room implementation This is really pushing it, considering it’s trained on… internet, with all available c compilers. The work is already impressive enough, no need for such misleading statements.

It's not a clean-room implementation, but not because it's trained on the internet. It's not a clean-room implementation because of this: > The fix was to use GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against

If you read the entire GCC source code and then create a compatible compiler, it's not clean room. Which Opus basically did since, I'm assuming, its training set contained the entire source of GCC. So even if they were actively referencing GCC I think that counts.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#270

Post by jesse__ »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #185
jesse__ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very wrong to me. Take the C4 training dataset for example. The uncompressed, uncleaned, size of the dataset is ~6TB, and contains an exhaustive English language scrape of the public internet from 2019. The cleaned (still uncompressed) dataset is significantly less than 1TB. I could go on, but, I think it's already pretty obvious that 1TB is more than enough storage to represent a significant portion of t…

This would imply that the English internet is not much bigger than 20x the English Wikipedia. That seems implausible.

> That seems implausible.

Why, exactly?

Refuting facts with "I doubt it, bro" isn't exactly a productive contribution to the conversation..

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