michaelothomas

I think you've nailed it.

Two years ago we were told AGI, massive job losses, and trillions in profits were around the corner; justifying enormous investments in Anthropic and OpenAI. Today I'm supposed to be impressed that they solved an obscure math problem by kinda/maybe copying someone else's work?

These models are not living up to the gargantuan hype fed to investors. So OpenAI and Anthropic are stuck: How do they have successful IPOs to generate exit capital for their investors when their IPOs are taking place right when frontier advancements are kinda petering out? You find a way, any way, to keep the hype train going and hope for the best.

Judging from the front pages of the world's newspapers, people are lapping this "AI will kill us all" nonsense up ... so it sure seems like it's going to work. Kudos.

I mean, I thought it was a pretty good explanation.

JavaScript plays fast and loose with types. Which means that when JIT compilers generate code for it, they have to make all sorts of conservative decisions. This makes generated code more complex and, in turn, slower.

Does that make sense?

Switching to WasmGC doesn't really change the equation here.

The difference is primarily algorithmic. Java on WasmGC is about 2x slower than Java on the JVM. The remaining 50x is just Chrome's regex impl being awesome.

The calculation engine was written in Java before Rust or Zig were invented.

It was all of the above.

We had a pretty awesome team of people working across the entire stack optimizing absolutely everything. The blog post only talks about the three optimizations that made the biggest difference.

For larger applications things like method dispatch performance start to dominate and you land closer to 2x overall performance uplift.

I don't know absolute values but Excel still has several advantages which make it faster: - Excel is written in C++ and compiled natively which will be a bit faster than Java running on the JVM. And Java running as WasmGC is about 2x slower than Java on the JVM. - Sheets is limited to 4GB of RAM by the browser, Excel isn't. - C++ can do shared memory multi-threading, WasmGC cannot.

The WasmGC version is twice as fast as the JS version. The article got slightly butchered in the editing room by non-engineers.