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.
Machine code is less portable, as new CPU optimizations and instructions are released, its easier to update a compiler to integrate those in its optimizations than regenerate and retest all of your code. Also, if you need to target different OSs, like windows vs MacOs vs Linux its easier to make portable code in something higher level like python or java.
Static analysis to check for things like memory leaks or security vulnerabilities like sql injections are likely easier to do on human readable code rather than assembly.
Its easier for a human to go in an tweak code that is written in human readable language rather than assembly.