alt Hacker NewsJust because it is in C, doesn't mean you will get C like performance. Just look at the benchmarks, it is 8x slower than just using PyTorch... while I get its cool to use LLMs to generate code at this level, getting super high performing optimized code is very much out of the domain of current frontier LLMs
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Absolutely true, but now I'll focus on making it fast and I believe it will be possible to go much faster. I left the agent working in the night with a specification and now I'm going to see the progresses and restart the work.
No it’s not. I have written cuda kernels and 8bit optimizers with this.
They’re actually very good at speed optimization and can iterate very quickly taking notes on trials and failures and benchmarks. I’ve had it write 10 different attempts in around an hour and benchmark them all then merge and beat very strong baselines in torch
The PyTorch version is using the GPU (with Metal Performance Shaders); this C version is currently using (in the docs I saw) a single CPU core, with AMX (via Apple Accelerate BLAS) but not yet with OpenMP for parallelism. It’s not slow because LLM code is bad, but because it’s not running on the same hardware. That said, it’s also not as fast as it is because of the LLM—all the critical code is in kernel libraries it calls (the same as for PyTorch).