alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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IMHO a new architecture doesn't really make it any more interesting: there's too many examples of adding new architectures in the existing codebases. Maybe if the new machine had some bizarre novel property, I suppose, but I can't come up with a good example.
If the model were retrained without any of the existing compilers/toolchains in its training set, and it could still do something like this, that would be very compelling to me.
"Couldn't stick to the ABI ... despite CPU manuals being available" is a bizarre interpretation. What the article describes is the generated code being too large. That's an optimization problem, not a "couldn't follow the documentation" problem.
And it's a bit of a nasty optimization problem, because the result is all or nothing. Implementing enough optimizations to get from 60kB to 33kB is useless, all the rewards come from getting to 32kB.