Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedChris Lattner: prediction
14 Sept 2023 Latent Space Doing it the Hard Way: Making the AI engine and language 🔥 of the future — with Chris Lattner of Modular
“Second goal is that my opinion is that like, if you push a lot of complexity out of your head, you make room for new kinds of complexity.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Chris Lattner
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 14 Sept 2023
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…So you kind of view compilers and languages as medium for which humans can collaborate or cross boundaries. I like compilers. I've been working on them for a long time, but work backwards from the problem, right? And if compilers are useful or the technology is compiler technology is useful to solve the problem, then that's cool. Let's use it. I don't have a compiler hammer that I'm running around looking for compiler hammer. Compiler problems to hit. Yeah, exactly. And so here, you say, what good is a compiler? Like what is the fundamental purpose of a compiler? Well, it's to make it so that you don't have to know as much about the hardware. You could write everything in very low level assembly code for every single problem that you have. But what a compiler or a programming language or an AI framer really does is it allows you to express things at a higher level of abstraction. Yeah. Now that goal serves multiple purposes. One purpose is that you make it easier, right? Second goal is that my opinion is that like, if you push a lot of complexity out of your head, you make room for new kinds of complexity. And so it's really about reduction of accidental complexity so that you can wrestle with the inherent complexity and the problem. Another is that by getting abstraction, right, you enable, for example, one of the things that compilers are good at, particularly modern ones like we're building, is that the compilers have infinite attention to detail. Humans don't, right? And so it turns out that, you know, if you hand write a bunch of assembly and then you have a similar problem, well, you just like take it and hack it a little bit without doing a first principles analysis of the best way to solve the problem, right? Well, compiler can actually do a lot better than that because CPU cycles are basically free these days. Yeah, exactly.…
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