Another way to look at this is: The first assembly language compiler was handcoded in binary to begin with, and then that compiler's machine code was translate

Another way to look at this is: The first assembly language compiler was handcoded in binary to begin with, and then that compiler's machine code was translated to the more expressive language (assembly). Similar for Fortran/C/etc. from assembly code. Progressively, more expressive languages have been bootstrapped from prior lower-level languages. In a similar way, perhaps a more concise LLM can be built by utilizing a less efficient one?