For background, I am a programmer, but have largely ignored everything having to do with AI (re: LLMs) for the past few years.

I just got to wondering, though. Why are these LLMs generating high level programming language code instead skipping the middle man and spitting out raw 1s and 0s for x86 to execute?

Is it that they aren’t trained on this sort of thing? Is it for the human code reviewers to be able to make their own edits on top of the AI-generated code? Are there AIs doing this that I’m just not aware of?

I just feel like there might be some level of optimization that could be made by something that understands the code and the machine at this level.

  • four@lemmy.zipEnglish
    191·
    3 days ago

    Also, not everything runs on x86. For example, you couldn’t write a website in raw binary, because the browser wouldn’t run it. Or maybe you already have a Python library and you just need to interact with. Or maybe you want code that can run on x86 and ARM, without having to generate it twice.
    As long as the output code has to interact with other code, raw binary won’t be useful.

    I also expect that it might be easier for an LLM to generate typical code and have a solid and tested compiler turn it into binary