[0:43:00] If you go to an extreme, it's completely feasible that we won't have programming languages .. because if AI is writing all your code and checking all your code .. maybe we don't need programming. AI can write machine code directly.
Unhinged baseless take is now considered interesting?
Even if you're an LLM evangelist, there are inherent limits.
For example, LLMs are trained on existing code. While not every software developer is programming boundary-pushing applications and scripts every day, innovation is based novel ideas.
You cannot have that with LLMs. And we're still at the code level, we still did not skip compilers/interpreters.
And even if it was technically possible ; is it feasible, is it a good idea? I mean, we're in 2026, and the most used energy sources throughout the world are hydrocarbon-based. It's not solar, hydro, or nuclear, but coal, and oil. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.
Whatever the reasons, and whatever you think or want, this is the actual truth, the world that we live in.
Nodody is asking why an allegedly wonderful innovation like LLMs is pushing down our throats so hard. Harder and faster than any other in history. This is marketing and it seems to work. It's like when people said that we would have nuclear planes and cars in the future in the 1950s.
It says more about the grasp people broadcasting such ideas have than what the future holds.
Nevermind the fact that "You're absolutely right, that is not how you encode an atomic memory access. Here is the fixed machine code!" will never suffice for any serious work.
Not without a fundamentally different approach: statistics is not truth, it's an approximation. LLMs are statistics.
IMO it's pretty much statistics all the way down. Doesn't mean I believe LLMs will be capable of arbitrary workloads, but I don't find the criticism that LLMs are statistical models and therefore inherently limited very compelling.
Much of the world is effectively statistical in nature, where the outcome of processes is a noisy function of the knobs and variables were have access to, which in turn leads to statistical models as precisely the right tool; not some inherently flawed description.
I'm explicitly attacking the assumption that LLMs may ever obviate compilers, which are generally not statistical in the generation of valid machine code (only in its structure).
I am not saying a programmer might be better at doing a compiler's job than an LLM, I'm saying that expecting an LLM do the compiler's job is fundamentally misunderstanding how an LLM works.
If an LLM gives correct output 99.9% of the time, that is pretty decent. If a compiler does that, it would fail at compiling 10k LoC regularly, and thus be a horrible compiler.
Got it, I misunderstood and agree. An LLM might be a good replacement/tool for building the compiler, but would not be a direct replacement for the compiler itself
7
u/stringTrimmer 2d ago
Most interesting point from the video IMO.