Might be one of the only use cases where LLMs are necessary to succeed. Can't imagine the pain of reverse engineering a technology of this scale and "secrecy".
replyTraditional hardware RE centers around heroics by a small number of very smart people, see: marcan, Alyssa Rosenzweig, Asahi Lina, etc. What they did is insanely impressive, and given how hard it was with LLMs I'm sure I would not personally be able to do this work without LLMs. That said, I'm looking forward to a world where the staring at hexdumps and traces can be delegated to LLMs and talented humans can spend their time building as opposed to head banging.
replyYeah I think it's a shame how much time and effort gets put into understanding things simply because other people want to keep them proprietary.
replyThe problem I’m finding, at least with today’s models, is that it produces disposable software. It’s not good at making well-architected, durable software. Stuff that could be maintained and bug-fixed.
replyI mean you can get good stuff out of it if you know what you are doing and guide it, but if you just say “here’s a regression suite. Write an implementation that passes” you will get something that works for a while but ages quickly and will need to be thrown away.
With today’s technology I’d still want a GPU driver developer guiding the LLM rather than some rando who is out of their element. But cutting down the exploration cycle time and giving the developer massive parallelism (have 10x agents exploring different hypotheses or features) is the real win. We don’t need to skip all the way to slop just to squeak out a little more effort savings.
replyI can’t help wondering if the whole process will be automated being an LLM.
replyApple releases the M15, and using everything leaned while building drivers for the M4 - M14, the LLM just does the whole job and we have the drivers a day later.
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replyI’m sure it’s really easy when you can get help from the people who made the chip or write the Apple drivers.
replyDid you read the article? They didn’t get help from the people who made the chip or wrote the Apple drivers.
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