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Comment by geraneum

4 hours ago

> This was a clean-room implementation

This is really pushing it, considering it’s trained on… internet, with all available c compilers. The work is already impressive enough, no need for such misleading statements.

29 comments

geraneum

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raincole  2 hours ago

It's not a clean-room implementation, but not because it's trained on the internet.

It's not a clean-room implementation because of this:

> The fix was to use GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against

  • Calavar  43 minutes ago

    The classical definition of a clean room implementation is something that's made by looking at the output of a prior implementation but not at the source.

    I agree that having a reference compiler available is a huge caveat though. Even if we completely put training data leakage aside, they're developing against a programmatic checker for a spec that's already had millions of man hours put into it. This is an optimal scenario for agentic coding, but the vast majority of problems that people will want to tackle with agentic coding are not going to look like that.

  • array_key_first  28 minutes ago

    If you read the entire GCC source code and then create a compatible compiler, it's not clean room. Which Opus basically did since, I'm assuming, its training set contained the entire source of GCC. So even if they were actively referencing GCC I think that counts.

TacticalCoder  5 minutes ago

I'm using AI to help me code and I love Anthropic but I chocked when I read that in TFA too.

It's all but a clean-room design. A clean-room design is a very well defined term: "Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

The "without infringing any of the copyrights" contains "any".

We know for a fact that models are extremely good at storing information with the highest compression rate ever achieved. It's not because it's typically decompressing that information in a lossy way that it didn't use that information in the first place.

Note that I'm not saying all AIs do is simply compress/decompress information. I'm saying that, as commenters noted in this thread, when a model was caught spotting out Harry Potter verbatim, there is information being stored.

It's not a clean-room design, plain and simple.

antirez  3 hours ago

The LLM does not contain a verbatim copy of whatever it saw during the pre-training stage, it may remember certain over-represented parts, otherwise it has a knowledge about a lot of things but such knowledge, while about a huge amount of topics, is similar to the way you could remember things you know very well. And, indeed, if you give it access to internet or the source code of GCC and other compilers, it will implement such a project N times faster.

  • halxc  3 hours ago

    We all saw verbatim copies in the early LLMs. They "fixed" it by implementing filters that trigger rewrites on blatant copyright infringement.

    It is a research topic for heaven's sake:

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16046

    • RyanCavanaugh  3 hours ago

      The internet is hundreds of billions of terabytes; a frontier model is maybe half a terabyte. While they are certainly capable of doing some verbatim recitations, this isn't just a matter of teasing out the compressed C compiler written in Rust that's already on the internet (where?) and stored inside the model.

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    • Aurornis  43 minutes ago

      Simple logic will demonstrate that you can't fit every document in the training set into the parameters of an LLM.

      Citing a random arXiv paper from 2025 doesn't mean "they" used this technique. It was someone's paper that they uploaded to arXiv, which anyone can do.

    • ben_w  3 hours ago

      We saw partial copies of large or rare documents, and full copies of smaller widely-reproduced documents, not full copies of everything. An e.g. 1 trillion parameter model is not a lossless copy of a ten-petabyte slice of plain text from the internet.

      The distinction may not have mattered for copyright laws if things had gone down differently, but the gap between "blurry JPEG of the internet" and "learned stuff" is more obviously important when it comes to e.g. "can it make a working compiler?"

      7 replies →