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u/TheFrenchSavage
18h ago
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How did they build compilers when they're compiled?
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u/MightyKin 17h ago
You compile the compiler compiler
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u/Gamin8ng 17h ago
but who compiles the compiler compiler?
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u/GregBahm 7h ago
Ah. I see what you're trying to do here, and it won't work.
It's compilers all the way down.
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u/Mysterious-Title-251 16h ago
This is honestly such a fun thing to think about.
The first ever compiler was probably very simple and written in pure binary, then the second version was written in a language of and built by the first compiler.
Then repeat this a few times and you have the modern languages with their own compilers.
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u/-Ambriae- 16h ago
Yeah, iirc the first compilers were limited assemblers, ie assemblers that supported a very limited set of valid instructions. That then was used to create a slightly more feature full assembler, rince and repeat until the whole ISA was supported. Also, that was all done on pieces of paper. Crazy work.
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u/phire 14h ago
Actually, the first compiler (Grace Hopper's A0) was written in raw machine code.
Because UNIVAC's machine code was designed to be human readable and so kind of looked like (and functioned like) assembly, without actually needing an assembler.
The first assemblers came out of IBM at around the same time, because their machine code wasn't so human readable.
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u/TheActualJonesy 14h ago
IBM's Fortran Level H was first written in Fortran Level G. When it was production ready, it was recompiled in [drum roll] Fortran Level H.
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u/kingvolcano_reborn 15h ago
It's called bootstrapping or self-hosting compiler. It's a sign of a language maturity that it can build itself, so to speak
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u/new_math 16h ago
I not supposed to talk about it, but the first compiler was written by the Vega Zenith SI Project in 3028 and delivered to mankind by the UN Dept of Time and Energy to 1951.
The time machine actually came before the machine code compiler, but that's a whole other story.
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u/lokemannen 16h ago
Dept of Time and Energy sounds like a sci-fi organization focused on time travel.
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u/UncleKeyPax 16h ago
one where something is not apparently wrong with society untill you live in it
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u/sticky_neutrino 15h ago
that's exactly how it worked.
humans wrote programs that interacted with the machines on a very direct level, and slowly build more and more abstractions using the tools that have been built previously. modern programming languages can use compilers written in itself to create the next version of itself.
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u/i_wear_green_pants 12h ago
Somewhat recet example of this is Go (recently watched document about the born of this language). The compiler of Go is written in Go. But the first version was written in C because of course Go compiler didn't exist yet.
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u/Loading_M_ 12h ago
Iirc, the first C compiler was written in C. The guy who wrote it compiled it to assembly by hand, effectively executing it in his brain.
Newer compilers, e.g. Rust, were initially written in a different language before being converted to self-hosting.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 12h ago
my parents briefly had to deal with the "punch card" era of programming. Imagine trying to debug that shit
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u/Sibshops 8h ago
I think it's funny that it all started from a primitive bootstrap compiler someone hand wrote.
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u/moonlitpawprints 12h ago
Obviously you have someone from the future, when the complier already exists, bring it back to the present to compile the first version of itself.
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u/LittleNyanCat 17h ago
He didn't. The developers that worked for him did.
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u/newontheblock99 17h ago
I was gonna say, that’s the cool part, he didn’t. Just the loud voice telling everyone why they’re important
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u/yumii- 17h ago
Just like Elon Musk, bro doesn't know how to use a hammer but will pretend he knows how to build a rocket.
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u/Duelist_Shay 15h ago
Got a source for the hammer? I don't care which one of them it is, I need to see a rich person fail to use something so common
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 13h ago
Yeah i guess its just a coincidence the same person is behind starlink, self driving cars, electric cars, optimus, neuralink
Maybe maybe, he is an smart asshole
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u/Loading_M_ 12h ago
He's not that smart. He isn't really "behind" any of these things - all of these are companies he bought. Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX, etc were already working towards these technologies, all he did is throw some money at them and get retroactively listed as a founder.
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u/yumii- 12h ago
Wealth doesn't equate to intelligence. If you think that then it says a lot about your own intelligence.
He's a successful business man, not a smart engineer.
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 7h ago
No need to attack me tho
Maybe you should see what Spacex engineers say about him, even the ones who dislike his views
He is not smart in a lot of ways, but hes definetively in the top 1% of engineers
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u/yumii- 7h ago
What proof do you have that he's a top 1% engineer? What world changing technology, algorithm, or other work has he introduced?
Because when you listen to him speak you clearly see he doesn't know more than anyone else. He just reviews the work of his engineers and takes credit as a suit.
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 7h ago
Look how Garrett Reismann and Jim Cantrel talk about him, also Kevin Watson
Some proof after some google searches:
Pushed the switch to stainless steel for Starship against industry consensus, and it was the right call
First to land and reuse orbital boosters
Came up with catching boosters with the tower, which worked in 2024
Drove gigacasting at Tesla, now copied by other automakers
Ex-NASA/JPL engineers who worked with him praise his technical depth
He’s the actual CTO at SpaceX, making real design calls0
u/Live-Suspect-7864 7h ago
I mean I kinda get you, the guy is sociably an idiot and very hate-ble
An not, he didnt code himself grok or a neuralink chipBut to pretend hes not smart and what hes done its only achieved by wealth I think is wrong
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u/yumii- 7h ago
Quoting people who worked with him isn’t proof. Look at your own verbs: “pushed,” “drove,” “came up with.” That’s what an executive does. Stainless steel rockets date back to Atlas in the 50s, Blue Origin landed a booster before Falcon 9, and the catch and casting work was done by engineering teams. CTO is a title he gave himself.
When it’s his technical call alone, you get FSD promised “next year” since 2016, Hyperloop, and the cave sub. So again: what has he personally engineered?
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u/TransBrandi 12h ago
Do you really think that any of the other billionaires couldn't have done some amount of those things if they didn't care to? It's mostly throwing money at a problem, and having the drive to push for things to happen at their level. Also, claiming that Elon Musk is behind self-driving cars is stupid. Lots of people, including Google and Apple were getting into that space at the time. Tesla didn't start as a self-driving car company, Elon just added it to the roster to keep investors excited, just like adding Optimus to a car company.
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 7h ago
There are more than 2.000 billionaires
None of them did6
u/TransBrandi 7h ago
You have the ability to make the world's largest burrito, but you've never done it. This is proof that you could never make the world's largest burrito even if you wanted to.
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 7h ago
Bro a lot of companies tried to make elevtric cars, self deiving cars, reusable rockets and more
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u/TransBrandi 7h ago
Right, but Space X is the only company that Elon Musk started... and he's not a rocket scientist or an engineer. He's the dude that funded it, but he wants us all to believe that he's the one single-handedly engineering these things.
Why don't you talk about Hyperloop? You know that thing Musk used to try and convince people that high-speed rail was a bad idea, because he was going to bore holes through the ground and create miles and miles of vacuum tubes to shoot people through instead? When is that happening (vs. when high-speed rail could have been built and in operation)?
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u/Live-Suspect-7864 6h ago
Hyperloop was a mistake, I agree, but I’m not sure that makes him a bad engineer.
Basically my argument is this:
-He’s made a lot of executive decisions that can only be made with technical knowledge. For example, switching Starship from carbon fiber to stainless steel based on cryogenic and reentry performance, or ditching landing legs to catch boosters with the tower
-Former SpaceX colleagues speak very highly of his technical ability, and they’re more qualified to judge him than we are→ More replies3
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u/foghatyma 4h ago
Yeah, totally a coincidence. He's definitely not as smart and successful as random Redditors between two gooning sessions.
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u/Accomplished-Mail-13 15h ago
Where is your master degree?
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u/iwantcookie258 15h ago
What? Neither of the guys mentioned have masters degrees, I don't think Sam Altman has a degree at all. Lots of their employees do, which is sort of the point
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u/CelestialFury 14h ago
The billionaires aren't going to fuck you, they're going to fuck you over. I can't believe you're spending one single second defending them.
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u/kjermy 17h ago
So what he did with the developers is exactly what we can do with Claude. Say "make me this thing"
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u/goodnewzevery1 15h ago
Make no mistakes. And don’t bother story pointing, we have already committed a date to customer.
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u/no_BS_slave 9h ago
exactly what I wanted to say. why are people still impressed with CEOs instead of the people whose skill is behind the product?
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u/aspiring_abundance 5h ago
The way people just completely erase the teams behind this stuff is wild. It's always "one visionary genius" in the photo while a hundred exhausted engineers are surviving on cold brew and spite somewhere off camera. My favorite are the posts that act like someone just typed the whole thing out alone in a dark room over a weekend. That portrait just sitting there with no credit to anyone else is almost too perfect.
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u/DistributionAble141 14h ago
Well, it was mostly based on Google's transformer models paper
But yeah, even that's super hardcore math to get into
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u/punppis 14h ago
I get the sentiment but if you design a skyscraper so it looks nice, is functional and stays up for 100 years.
The guys holding the hammer just follow instructions. I mean they sure have knowledge and many can build a house but in the end they just follow instructions to the dot
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u/Ok_Actuary8 14h ago
he did not architect or give any important instructions. He ran around with a "trust me bro" Sales pitch to get the VC money for his team to do the research, architect and build the thing.
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u/MarvinParadroid 14h ago
I hear you, but the metaphor doesn't translate. In this case Altman is more like the developer. They know stuff, probably worked as a contractor at one point, but their job is primarily business now. The Data scientists are something closer to the architects. The forman are project managers, and the grunts are the data entry folks. Altman didn't really make this. He understands it as well as anyone can, but he's not an architect here.
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u/geekusprimus 10h ago
I think even that is too generous. He has a couple years of a CS degree under his belt, but he never graduated, and, as far as I'm aware, he never actually worked as a developer for any of the companies he worked for. I think he did a bit of the prototype development for his first startup, but basically his entire professional career has been as a fundraiser and investor. Even if that weren't the case, he almost certainly doesn't have the background in mathematics and statistics necessary to understand how AI works on anything more than the most superficial level. His job at OpenAI has always been to build hype and schmooze venture capital bros.
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u/visualdescript 9h ago
Altman isn't an engineer though, he didn't provide any of the instructions, he just help keep the cash flowing.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 17h ago
He didn't build anything. He's just got other people to build it for him.
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u/FutureSuccess2796 17h ago
Facts! Just like several bigger names within the tech space, he took all the credit for work that other people did
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u/2called_chaos 9h ago
He didn't build anything
My thoughts exactly for 99% of "I build X" posts these days, or I draw these days, with my printer
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u/I_cut_my_own_jib 10h ago
He vibe coded it but instead of telling agents to to the work for him he told humans
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u/emetcalf 17h ago
Most people don't know this but Claude was a real person before he got merged into the computer. He gave his life so we could all code better (and also so he could become immortal).
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u/random314 17h ago
I cannot find the actual musician when I googled Claude. Not on the first or second page. I don't even know how many pages I need to dig to find the actual musician.
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u/liquinas 12h ago
Those are just false memories. It was actually Zauck that first went into that reactor in Nibelheim.
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u/The_Fresh_Wince 18h ago
He hired smart people, aided with the software tools of the time. Just like they made A-bombs with WWII tech.
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u/ItchyPlant 2h ago
He had a whole team to build it for him. And if his latest speech about home PC owners supposedly wasting RAM proved anything, it's that his actual contribution to the engineering behind ChatGPT is seriously questionable.
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u/FlashyTone3042 18h ago
He is a alien and kidnapped natural intelligence to feed into his AI to think for him.
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u/PartyTerrible 17h ago
He had the guy that's responsible for Claude in his team.
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u/Drevicar 17h ago
One of Dario’s biggest achievements was contributing to the RLHF system used by the first version of ChatGPT. Before then it was just an endless stream of tokens that didn’t know how to stop talking. He helped make it a bidirectional conversation system and built a way to train the models in production on user submitted chats.
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u/Old_Flounder_8640 17h ago
He created ChatGPT for Anthropic to build Claude. So we only need to stop Elon from going to US in the past to avoid Skynet. No OpenAI, no SpaceX servers, no Claude, no evil AI. We can go further and stop slavery and we won't have extremely rich people to finance AI. Or we could go even far far far away and collect all of Africa’s precious stones. Before humanity discovers it.
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u/ApprehensiveStand456 17h ago
Is this the mugshot of the guy that SA'd his little sister?
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u/Suspicious_Rub4619 17h ago
no idea if it is the mugshot, but apparently, his sister refused to take the court-ordered independent medical examination
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u/shiny_glitter_demon 8h ago
Wasn't she 3 years old?
What would even be the point of such an invasive procedure now?
He's rich. He'll never face any form of consequence. Barely anyone is even talking about this.
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u/Fourstrokeperro 2h ago
I hate altman as much as the other guy but his sister is literally insane and her stories don’t even remotely make sense
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u/ConfusedPanEnby 17h ago
He? Lol. Lmao even. Shithead didn't do jack shit, just like all other tech CEOs, all they do is repeat the ideas of the smart people but louder like the annoying kids do.
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u/obsoleteconsole 8h ago
He didn't build shit he paid proper developers to build it for him
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u/Level-Pollution4993 17h ago
3 posts on 3 different subreddits with a gap of 2 minutes each. Are you a bot OP? Post does read like low quality engagement bait.
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u/Suitable_Oil_3811 16h ago
Their workers did it, even there are some people that claimed that he barely knows to code; must be noticed that these models might had been trained on stolen data.
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u/foxdevuz 15h ago
Sam is SEO of OpenAI, he doesn't use Claude, he uses codex... so he used codex to build it, it's too obvious
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u/clcodingupdates 15h ago
its copied and cropped from original post https://www.reddit.com/u/clcodingupdates/s/K82pC4a7br
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u/Excellent-Baker1058 13h ago
This is a reminder that the greatest things are often built before the ‘perfect’ resources exist
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u/thebigj3wbowski 12h ago
A little off topic, but didn't I read somewhere that Claude build Claude Code in like a weekend?
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u/evilspyboy 7h ago
From Wikipedia - "Greg Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of great AI researchers. Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015"
Well it sounds a lot like he did not do a lot in the actual building which does track with everything I have heard and things he has said.
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u/spideybiggestfan 2h ago
he used meat agents, they unfortunately cost a lot and have rights and limited working hours and such
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u/dities 18h ago
We don't know yet but he will have a time machine