Re:Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
by dns_snek on Monday January 12, 2026 @08:04AM
(#46587896)
> If AI can take all the crap code humans are writing and make it better, that sounds like a huge win.
This sort of misunderstanding of achievements is what keeps driving the AI mania. The AI generated an algorithm for optimizing a well-defined, bounded mathematical problem that marginally beat the human-written algorithms.
This AI can't do what you're hyping it up to do because software optimization is a different kind of optimization problem - it's complex, underspecified, and it doesn't have general algorithmic solutions.
LLM may play a significant role in optimizing software some day but it's not going to have much in common with optimization in a mathematical sense so this achievement doesn't get us any closer to that goal.
This sort of misunderstanding of achievements is what keeps driving the AI mania. The AI generated an algorithm for optimizing a well-defined, bounded mathematical problem that marginally beat the human-written algorithms.
This AI can't do what you're hyping it up to do because software optimization is a different kind of optimization problem - it's complex, underspecified, and it doesn't have general algorithmic solutions.
LLM may play a significant role in optimizing software some day but it's not going to have much in common with optimization in a mathematical sense so this achievement doesn't get us any closer to that goal.