It cost $20,000 and it worked, but it's also totally possible to spend $20,000 and have Claude shit out a pile of nonsense. You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. Anthropic doesn't sell a contract that says "We'll only bill you if it works" like you can get from a bunch of humans.
Do catastrophic bugs exist in that code? Who knows, it's 100,000 lines, it'll take a while to review.
On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it.
All of those things combined, viability remains a serious question.
I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
You should look it up. :)
If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
That level of quality should be sufficient.
Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX?
No you don't. They do not exist.
You can give a developer the GCC test suite and have them build the compiler backwards, which is how this was done. It also literally uses GCC in the background... Maybe try reading the article.
It seems they are *not* losing money on inference: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e
This has got to be my favorite one of them all that keeps coming up in too many comments… You know who also was losing money in the beginning?! every successful company that ever existed! some like Uber were losing billions for a decade. and when was the last time you rode in a taxi? (I still do, my kid never will). not sure how old you are and if you remember “facebook will never be able to monetize on mobile…” - they all lose money, until they do not
with all optimizations disabled:
> Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.