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

anthropic.com

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

#401

Post by dnautics »

beambot wrote: post #221
ndesaulniers wrote: post #165

I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ This LLM did it in (checks notes): > Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes! > The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootab…

This is getting close to a Ken Thompson "Trusting Trust" era -- AI could soon embed itself into the compilers themselves.

would be hard to miss gigantic kv cache matrix multiplications

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

#402

Post by soraminazuki »

Aurornis wrote: post #257
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pay to use non-deterministic compiler. Sounds amazing, you should start.

Application-specific AI models can be much smaller and faster than the general purpose, do-everything LLM models. This allows them to run locally. They can also be made to be deterministic. Some extra care is required to avoid computation paths that lead to numerical differences on different machines, but this can be accomplished reliably with small models that use integer math and use kernels that follow a specific…

> They can also be made to be deterministic.

Yeah, in the same way how pseudo-random number generators are "deterministic." They generate the exact same sequence of numbers every time given the seeds are the same!

But that's not the "determinism" people are referring to when they say LLMs aren't deterministic.

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

#403

Post by [deleted] »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #250
beambot wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting close to a Ken Thompson "Trusting Trust" era -- AI could soon embed itself into the compilers themselves.

We're already starting to see people experimenting with applying AI towards register allocation and inlining heuristics. I think that many fields within a compiler are still ripe for experimentation. https://llvm.org/docs/MLGO.html

[deleted]

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

#405

Post by LinXitoW »

qarl wrote: post #332
ndesaulniers wrote: post #165

I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ This LLM did it in (checks notes): > Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes! > The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootab…

> Still a really cool project! Yeah. This test sorta definitely proves that AI is legit. Despite the millions of people still insisting it's a hoax. The fact that the optimizations aren't as good as the 40 year gcc project? Eh - I think people who focus on that are probably still in some serious denial.

How does 20K to replicate code available in the thousands online (toy C compilers) prove anything? It requires a bunch of caveats about things that don't work, it requires a bunch of other tools to do stuff, and an experienced developer had to guide it pretty heavily to even get that lackluster result.

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

#407

Post by LinXitoW »

modeless wrote: post #31
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #19

This 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…

There seem to still be a lot of people who look at results like this and evaluate them purely based on the current state. I don't know how you can look at this and not realize that it represents a huge improvement over just a few months ago, there have been continuous improvements for many years now, and there is no reason to believe progress is stopping here. If you project out just one year, even assuming progress…

The main issue with improvements in the last year is that a lot of it is based not on the models strictly becoming better, but on tooling being better, and simply using a fuckton more tokens for the same task.

Remember that all these companies can only exist because of massive (over)investments in the hope of insane returns and AGI promises. While all these improvements (imho) prove the exact opposite: AGI is absolutely not coming, and the investments aren't going to generate these outsized returns. The will generate decent returns, and the tools are useful.

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

#408

Post by LinXitoW »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #142
nozzlegear wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every S-curve looks like an exponential until you hit the bend.

We've been hearing this for 3 years now. And especially 25 was full of "they've hit a wall, no more data, running out of data, plateau this, saturated that". And yet, here we are. Models keep on getting better, at more broad tasks, and more useful by the month.

Model improvement is very much slowing down, if we actually use fair metrics. Most improvements in the last year or so comes down to external improvements, like better tooling, or the highly sophisticated practice of throwing way more tokens at the same problem (reasoning and agents).

Don't get me wrong, LLMs are useful. They just aren't the kind of useful that Sam et al. sold investors. No AGI, no full human worker replacement, no massive reduction in cost for SOTA.

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

#410

Post by m4ck_ »

trilogic wrote: post #13

Can it create employment? How is this making life better. I understand the achievement but come on, wouldn´t it be something to show if you created employment for 10000 people using your 20000 USD! Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, all solving the wrong problems, your problems not the collective ones.

Didn't you hear? We're heading towards a workless utopia where everything will be free (according to people who are actively working to eliminate things like food assistance for less fortunate mothers and children.)
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