alt Hacker News> Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1].
Well, of course. Despite people applying the label of AI to them, LLMs don't have a shred of intelligence. That is inherent to how they work. They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on.
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> don't have a shred of intelligence. ... They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on.
Couldn't you say that about 99% of humans too?
You could say the same thing about Chris Lattner. How did he advance the state of the art with Swift? It’s essentially just a subjective rearranging of deck chairs: “I like this but not that.” Someone had to explain to Lattner why it was a good idea to support tail recursion in LLVM, for example - something he would have already known if he had been trained differently. He regurgitates his training just like most of us do.
That might read like an insult to Lattner, but what I’m really pointing out is that we tend to hold AIs to a much higher standard than we do humans, because the real goal of such commentary is to attempt to dismiss a perceived competitive threat.
>Despite people applying the label of AI to them, LLMs don't have a shred of intelligence. That is inherent to how they work. They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on
People also "synthesize from the data they were trained on". Intelligence is a result of that. So this dead-end argument then turns into begging the question: LLMs don't have intelligence because LLMs can't have intelligence.