Re:Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC
by anonnon on Monday February 09, 2026 @03:40AM
(#46943052)
The "Anti" position at this point is only tenable if you believe LLMs are going to hit a major roadblock in the next few months around which Big AI won't be able to navigate. Something akin to the various "ghosts in the machine" that started bedeviling EEs around the turn of Millenium when transistors got sufficiently small, including gate leakage and sub-threshold current, such that Dennard Scaling came to an abrupt end and clock speeds stalled.
I personally hope that that happens, but I doubt it will. Note also that processors still continued to improve even without Dennard Scaling, due to denser, better optimized onboard caches, better branch prediction, and more parallelism (including at the instruction level), and the broader trend towards SoCs and away from PCB-based systems, among other things, so at least by analogy, it's not impossible that even with that conjectured roadblock, Big AI could still find room for improvement, albeit at a much slower rate.
But LLMs as they are now are thoroughly compelling, and even just continued incremental improvements will prove extremely disruptive to society.
I personally hope that that happens, but I doubt it will. Note also that processors still continued to improve even without Dennard Scaling, due to denser, better optimized onboard caches, better branch prediction, and more parallelism (including at the instruction level), and the broader trend towards SoCs and away from PCB-based systems, among other things, so at least by analogy, it's not impossible that even with that conjectured roadblock, Big AI could still find room for improvement, albeit at a much slower rate.
But LLMs as they are now are thoroughly compelling, and even just continued incremental improvements will prove extremely disruptive to society.