6 ms·

Aside that space invaders from scratch is not representative for real engineering, it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be i

Aside that space invaders from scratch is not representative for real engineering, it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine (no usage tier per hour or week), let’s say, one year from now. At $200 per month for 2 years I can buy a decent Mx with 64GB (or perhaps even 128GB taking residual value into account)

falcor84 1y ago
How come it's "not representative for real engineering"? Other than copy-pasting existing code (which is not what an LLM does), I don't see how you can create a space invaders game without applying "engineering".
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> Other than copy-pasting existing code (which is not what an LLM does) I'd like to see someone try to prove this. How many space invaders projects exist on the internet? I'd be hard to compare model "generated" code to everything out there looking for plagiarism, but I bet there are lots of snippets pulled in. These things are NOT smart, they are huge and articulate information repositories.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Go for it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=github+space+invaders https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=github+... has a bunch of results. Here's the source code GLM-4.5 Air spat out for me on my laptop: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM-4.5-Air-3bit.html https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM... Based on my mental model of how these things work I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even a few lines of code duplicated from one of those projects into the code that GLM-4.5 wrote for me.
    - phkahler 1y ago
      So I scanned the beginning of the generated code, picked line 83: animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite; stuffed it verbatim into google and found a stack overflow discussion that contained this: animation: glow .5s infinite alternate; in under one minute. Then I found this page of CSS effects: https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/ https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/ Another page has examples and contains: animation: float 15s infinite ease-in-out; There is just too much internet to scan for an exact match or a match of larger size.
      - simonw 1y ago
        That's not an example of copying from an existing Space Invaders implementation. That's an LLM using a CSS animation pattern - one that it's seen thousands (probably millions) of times in the training data. That's what I expect these things to do: they break down Space Invaders into the components they need to build, then mix and match thousands of different coding patterns (like "animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite;") to implement different aspects of that game. You can see that in the "reasoning" trace here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f515c8e32fb791549aeb88304550893#file-space_invaders-txt-L41 https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f515c8e32fb791549aeb88304550... - "I'll use a modern design with smooth animations, particle effects, and a retro-futuristic aesthetic."
        threeducks 1y ago
        I think LLMs are adapting higher level concepts. For example, the following JavaScript code generated by GLM (https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9e04fd9895fae1aa9ac78b8e62d2833831fe0544/space-invaders-GLM-4.5-Air-3bit.html#L387-L405 https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9e04fd9895fae1aa9ac78b8...) is clearly inspired by this C++ code (https://github.com/portapack-mayhem/mayhem-firmware/blob/28e2f770e5f9cb60021a1ddfe12cdc1a1f82d38f/firmware/application/external/spaceinv/ui_spaceinv.cpp#L468-L486 https://github.com/portapack-mayhem/mayhem-firmware/blob/28e...), but it is not an exact copy.
        1y ago
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Sorites paradox. Where's the distinction between "snippet" and "a design pattern"? Compressing a few petabytes into a few gigabytes requires that they can't be like this about all of the things they're accused of simply copy-pasting, from code to newspaper articles to novels. There's not enough space.
- hbn 1y ago
  The prompt was > Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders It may not be "copy pasting" but it's generating output as best it can be recreated from its training on looking at Space Invaders source code. The engineers at Taito that originally developed Space Invaders were not told "make Space Invaders" and then did their best to recall all the source code they've looked at in their life to re-type the source code to an existing game. From a logistics standpoint, where the source code already exists and is accessible, you may as well have copy-pasted it and fudged a few things around.
  - simonw 1y ago
    The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs. I used that prompt because it's the shortest possible prompt that tells the model to build a game with a specific set of features. If I wanted to build a custom game I would have had to write a prompt that was many paragraphs longer than that. The aim of this piece isn't "OMG looks LLMs can build space invaders" - at this point that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      > The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs. Sure but that doesn’t impact the OPs point at all because there are numerous copies of reverse engineered source code available. There are numerous copies of the reverse engineered source code already translated to JavaScript in your models training set.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      > What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now. I'm afraid no one cared much about your point :) You'll only get "OMG look how good LLMs are they'll get us all fired!" comments and "LLMs suck" comments. This is how it goes with religion...
    - hbn 1y ago
- sharkjacobs 1y ago
  Making a space invaders game is not representative of normal engineering because you're reproducing an existing game with well known specs and requirements. There are probably hundreds of thousands of words describing and discussing Space Invaders in GLM-4.5's training data It's like using an LLM to implement a red black tree. Red black trees are in the training data, so you don't need to explain or describe what you mean beyond naming it. "Real engineering" with LLMs usually requires a bunch of up front work creating specs and outlines and unit tests. "Context engineering"
  - jasonvorhe 1y ago
    Smells like moving the goal post. What's real engineering to be in 2028? Implementing Google's infra stack in your homelab?
rafaelmn 1y ago
What about power used and support hardware ? Also card going down means you are down until you get warranty service.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  why are you doing anything locally then?
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    Latency and tooling support ? UX of cloud based LLM vs local is much better for the cloud option - not so much for dev tooling. I tried using remote workstations - I am not a fan of lugging a beefy client machine to do my work - would much rather use something thats super light and power efficient.
tptacek 1y ago
OK, go write Space Invaders by hand.
- LandR 1y ago
  I'd hope most professional software engineers could do this in an afternoon or so?
  - sejje 1y ago
    Most professional software engineers have never written a game and don't do web work, so I somehow doubt that.
    - anthk 1y ago
      With TCL/TK it's a matter of less than 2 hours.
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    Depends on the rules. Can I look up other space invaders games on github first? Can I use a game framework? Just JS / HTML docs I probably could not.
    - pharrington 1y ago
      No preexisting framework.
dmortin 1y ago
" it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine " Most people won't bother with buying powerful hardware for this, they will keep using SAAS solutions, so Anthropic can be in trouble if cheaper SAAS solutions come out.
qingcharles 1y ago
The frontier models are always going to tempt you with their higher quality and quicker generation, IMO.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  I’ve been mentally mapping tge models to the history of db. Most db in the early days you had to pay for. There are still for pay db that are just better than ones you don’t pay for. Some teams think that the cost is worth the improvements and there is a (tough) business there. Fortunes were made in the early days. But eventually open source models became good enough for many use cases and they have their own advantages. So lots of teams use them. I think coding models might have a similar trajectory.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    You make a good point -- a majority of applications are now using open source or free versions[1] of DBs. My only feedback is: are these the same animal? Can we compare an O/S DB vs. paid/closed DB to me running an LLM locally? The biggest issue right now with LLMs is simply the cost of the hardware to run one locally, not the quality of the actual software (the model). [1] e.g. SQL Server Express is good enough for a lot of tasks, and I guess would be roughly equivalent to the upcoming open versions of GPT vs. the frontier version.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
      A majority of apps nowadays are using proprietary forks of open source DBs running in the cloud, where their feature set is (slightly) rounded out and smoothed off by the cloud vendors. Not that many projects are doing fully self-hosted RDBMS at this point. So ultimately proprietary databases still win out, they just (ab)use the Postgresql trademark to make people think they're using open source. LLMs might go the same way. The big clouds offering proprietary fine tunes of models given away by AI labs using investor money?
      - qingcharles 1y ago

falcor84 1y ago

How come it's "not representative for real engineering"? Other than copy-pasting existing code (which is not what an LLM does), I don't see how you can create a space invaders game without applying "engineering".

phkahler 1y ago
>> Other than copy-pasting existing code (which is not what an LLM does) I'd like to see someone try to prove this. How many space invaders projects exist on the internet? I'd be hard to compare model "generated" code to everything out there looking for plagiarism, but I bet there are lots of snippets pulled in. These things are NOT smart, they are huge and articulate information repositories.
- simonw 1y ago
  Go for it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=github+space+invaders https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=github+... has a bunch of results. Here's the source code GLM-4.5 Air spat out for me on my laptop: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM-4.5-Air-3bit.html https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM... Based on my mental model of how these things work I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even a few lines of code duplicated from one of those projects into the code that GLM-4.5 wrote for me.
  - phkahler 1y ago
    So I scanned the beginning of the generated code, picked line 83: animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite; stuffed it verbatim into google and found a stack overflow discussion that contained this: animation: glow .5s infinite alternate; in under one minute. Then I found this page of CSS effects: https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/ https://alvarotrigo.com/blog/animated-backgrounds-css/ Another page has examples and contains: animation: float 15s infinite ease-in-out; There is just too much internet to scan for an exact match or a match of larger size.
    - simonw 1y ago
      That's not an example of copying from an existing Space Invaders implementation. That's an LLM using a CSS animation pattern - one that it's seen thousands (probably millions) of times in the training data. That's what I expect these things to do: they break down Space Invaders into the components they need to build, then mix and match thousands of different coding patterns (like "animation: glow 2s ease-in-out infinite;") to implement different aspects of that game. You can see that in the "reasoning" trace here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f515c8e32fb791549aeb88304550893#file-space_invaders-txt-L41 https://gist.github.com/simonw/9f515c8e32fb791549aeb88304550... - "I'll use a modern design with smooth animations, particle effects, and a retro-futuristic aesthetic."
      - threeducks 1y ago
        I think LLMs are adapting higher level concepts. For example, the following JavaScript code generated by GLM (https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9e04fd9895fae1aa9ac78b8e62d2833831fe0544/space-invaders-GLM-4.5-Air-3bit.html#L387-L405 https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9e04fd9895fae1aa9ac78b8...) is clearly inspired by this C++ code (https://github.com/portapack-mayhem/mayhem-firmware/blob/28e2f770e5f9cb60021a1ddfe12cdc1a1f82d38f/firmware/application/external/spaceinv/ui_spaceinv.cpp#L468-L486 https://github.com/portapack-mayhem/mayhem-firmware/blob/28e...), but it is not an exact copy.
        1y ago
- ben_w 1y ago
  Sorites paradox. Where's the distinction between "snippet" and "a design pattern"? Compressing a few petabytes into a few gigabytes requires that they can't be like this about all of the things they're accused of simply copy-pasting, from code to newspaper articles to novels. There's not enough space.
hbn 1y ago
The prompt was > Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders It may not be "copy pasting" but it's generating output as best it can be recreated from its training on looking at Space Invaders source code. The engineers at Taito that originally developed Space Invaders were not told "make Space Invaders" and then did their best to recall all the source code they've looked at in their life to re-type the source code to an existing game. From a logistics standpoint, where the source code already exists and is accessible, you may as well have copy-pasted it and fudged a few things around.
- simonw 1y ago
  The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs. I used that prompt because it's the shortest possible prompt that tells the model to build a game with a specific set of features. If I wanted to build a custom game I would have had to write a prompt that was many paragraphs longer than that. The aim of this piece isn't "OMG looks LLMs can build space invaders" - at this point that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    > The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs. Sure but that doesn’t impact the OPs point at all because there are numerous copies of reverse engineered source code available. There are numerous copies of the reverse engineered source code already translated to JavaScript in your models training set.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now. I'm afraid no one cared much about your point :) You'll only get "OMG look how good LLMs are they'll get us all fired!" comments and "LLMs suck" comments. This is how it goes with religion...
  - hbn 1y ago
sharkjacobs 1y ago
Making a space invaders game is not representative of normal engineering because you're reproducing an existing game with well known specs and requirements. There are probably hundreds of thousands of words describing and discussing Space Invaders in GLM-4.5's training data It's like using an LLM to implement a red black tree. Red black trees are in the training data, so you don't need to explain or describe what you mean beyond naming it. "Real engineering" with LLMs usually requires a bunch of up front work creating specs and outlines and unit tests. "Context engineering"
- jasonvorhe 1y ago
  Smells like moving the goal post. What's real engineering to be in 2028? Implementing Google's infra stack in your homelab?

rafaelmn 1y ago

What about power used and support hardware ? Also card going down means you are down until you get warranty service.

skeezyboy 1y ago
why are you doing anything locally then?
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  Latency and tooling support ? UX of cloud based LLM vs local is much better for the cloud option - not so much for dev tooling. I tried using remote workstations - I am not a fan of lugging a beefy client machine to do my work - would much rather use something thats super light and power efficient.

tptacek 1y ago

OK, go write Space Invaders by hand.

LandR 1y ago
I'd hope most professional software engineers could do this in an afternoon or so?
- sejje 1y ago
  Most professional software engineers have never written a game and don't do web work, so I somehow doubt that.
  - anthk 1y ago
    With TCL/TK it's a matter of less than 2 hours.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Depends on the rules. Can I look up other space invaders games on github first? Can I use a game framework? Just JS / HTML docs I probably could not.
  - pharrington 1y ago
    No preexisting framework.

dmortin 1y ago

" it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine " Most people won't bother with buying powerful hardware for this, they will keep using SAAS solutions, so Anthropic can be in trouble if cheaper SAAS solutions come out.

qingcharles 1y ago

The frontier models are always going to tempt you with their higher quality and quicker generation, IMO.

kasey_junk 1y ago
I’ve been mentally mapping tge models to the history of db. Most db in the early days you had to pay for. There are still for pay db that are just better than ones you don’t pay for. Some teams think that the cost is worth the improvements and there is a (tough) business there. Fortunes were made in the early days. But eventually open source models became good enough for many use cases and they have their own advantages. So lots of teams use them. I think coding models might have a similar trajectory.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  You make a good point -- a majority of applications are now using open source or free versions[1] of DBs. My only feedback is: are these the same animal? Can we compare an O/S DB vs. paid/closed DB to me running an LLM locally? The biggest issue right now with LLMs is simply the cost of the hardware to run one locally, not the quality of the actual software (the model). [1] e.g. SQL Server Express is good enough for a lot of tasks, and I guess would be roughly equivalent to the upcoming open versions of GPT vs. the frontier version.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    A majority of apps nowadays are using proprietary forks of open source DBs running in the cloud, where their feature set is (slightly) rounded out and smoothed off by the cloud vendors. Not that many projects are doing fully self-hosted RDBMS at this point. So ultimately proprietary databases still win out, they just (ab)use the Postgresql trademark to make people think they're using open source. LLMs might go the same way. The big clouds offering proprietary fine tunes of models given away by AI labs using investor money?
    - qingcharles 1y ago