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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

#81

Post by jcalvinowens »

Philpax wrote: post #61
jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

How much of this result is effectively plagiarized open source compiler code? I don't understand how this is compelling at all: obviously it can regurgitate things that are nearly identical in capability to already existing code it was explicitly trained on... It's very telling how all these examples are all "look, we made it recreate a shitter version of a thing that already exists in the training set".

What Rust-based compiler is it plagiarising from?

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.

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

#82

Post by wmf »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25
7734128 wrote: post #17

I'm sure this is impressive, but it's probably not the best test case given how many C compilers there are out there and how they presumably have been featured in the training data. This is almost like asking me to invent a path finding algorithm when I've been thought Dijkstra's and A*.

It's a bit disappointing that people are still re-hashing the same "it's in the training data" old thing from 3 years ago. It's not like any LLM could 1for1 regurgitate millions of LoC from any training set... This is not how it works. A pertinent quote from the article (which is a really nice read, I'd recommend reading it fully at least once): > Previous Opus 4 models were barely capable of producing a functional c…

In this case it's not reproducing training data verbatim but it probably is using algorithms and data structures that were learned from existing C compilers. On one hand it's good to reuse existing knowledge but such knowledge won't be available if you ask Claude to develop novel software.

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

#83

Post by Philpax »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #81
Philpax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Rust-based compiler is it plagiarising from?

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.

Please don't open a bridge to the Rust flamewar from the AI flamewar :-)

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

#84

Post by jcalvinowens »

Philpax wrote: post #83
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.

Please don't open a bridge to the Rust flamewar from the AI flamewar :-)

Hahaha, fair enough, but I refuse to be shy about having this opinion :)

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

#85

Post by Philpax »

fxtentacle wrote: post #76

You could hire a reasonably skilled dev in India for a week for $1k —- or you could pay $20k in LLM tokens, spend 2 hours writing essays to explain what you want, and then get a buggy mess.

No human developer, not even Fabrice Bellard, could reproduce this specific result in a week. A subset of it, sure, but not everything this does.

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

#86

Post by modeless »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #81
Philpax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Rust-based compiler is it plagiarising from?

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.

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

#87

Post by falcor84 »

trilogic wrote: post #62
jeffbee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Employment" is not intrinsically valuable. It is an emergent property of one way of thinking about economic systems.

For employment I mean "WHATEVER LEADS TO REWARD COLLECTIVE HUMANS TO SURVIVE". Call it as you wish, but I am certainly not talking about coding values.

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 end to capitalism", but to quote another dreamer: "Imagine all the people sharing all the world".

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

#88

Post by antirez »

geraneum wrote: post #36
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…

> 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.

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 implement such a project N times faster.

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

#89

Post by jeroenhd »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #47

How much of this result is effectively plagiarized open source compiler code? I don't understand how this is compelling at all: obviously it can regurgitate things that are nearly identical in capability to already existing code it was explicitly trained on... It's very telling how all these examples are all "look, we made it recreate a shitter version of a thing that already exists in the training set".

The fact it couldn't actually stick to the 16 bit ABI so it had to cheat and call out to GCC to get the system to boot says a lot.

Without enough examples to copy from (despite CPU manuals being available in the training set) the approach failed. I wonder how well it'll do when you throw it a new/imaginary instruction set/CPU architecture; I bet it'll fail in similar ways.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

geraneum wrote: post #36
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…

> 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.

[deleted]
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