alt Hacker NewsThe reason this cost so much is because the AI has the ridiculous goal of getting identical assembly output.
The agents would have had to mess around with compiler versions, optimisation options, and the phase of the moon as well.
If you just went for functional equivalence, it would probably cost 10x or 100x less tokens.
Another false economy was using Sonnet instead of a more intelligent model like Sol 6.1 (1), which would have cost more per token, but is 100x or so better at reverse engineering and coding and therefore can chew through the source code much quicker and make fewer mistakes, meaning less work needing to be scrapped.
In my testing doing a similar task, I ran multiple sonnet for weeks and burnt through ~$1000 in tokens to get 20% completion and output that was pretty bad. After switching to Sol 6.1, it finished the whole task in around 2 days, cost around $50, and it did it with zero supervision and a single /goal.
(1): struggle to use Opus for reverse engineering, too many safeguards. OAI has virtually none, and uses way less tokens so is more economical.
Identical output isn’t ridiculous. It’s pretty much a requirement to ensure the game actually is the same in every way. These decomp projects are pitched as a high performance alternative to emulation.
No one is going to use it if it’s a kind of close but not really reimplementation.
Testing functional equivalence is also pretty much impossible. How would you for example test the new one has exactly the same bugs which haven’t been discovered yet. Or doesn’t introduce new ones? This stuff matters for speed runners.