alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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You couldn't reasonably claim you did a clean-room implementation of something you had read the source to even though you, too, would not have a verbatim copy of the entire source code in your memory (barring very rare people with exceptional memories).
It's kinda the whole point - you haven't read it so there's no doubt about copying in a clean-room experiment.
A "human style" clean-room copy here would have to be using a model trained on, say, all source code except GCC. Which would still probably work pretty well, IMO, since that's a pretty big universe still.
So it will copy most code with adding subtle bugs
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