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.
You’re assuming ai writes useable code. I haven’t seen it.
Think of the ai more as a writing assistant, like autocomplete or stack overflow but more so. The IDE I use can autocomplete variables or function calls, but the ai can autocomplete entire lines of code or entire unit tests. AI might try to fit an online answer and related doc to solve a problem I’m seeing. AI might even create a class around a public api that is a great starting point for my code. AI can be a useful tool but it can’t write useable code
I think that’s the misconception people think they are going to give you a program if you just tell AI to do it.