<story><title>GPT-4 “discovered” the same sorting algorithm as AlphaDev by removing “mov S P”</title><url>https://twitter.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1666843952824168465</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danpalmer</author><text>The paper shows several distinct improvements to a sorting algorithm, and presents evidence that the process is generally applicable. This tweet points GPT-4 at 20 instructions and asks if any can be removed, and it finds one optimisation.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s good to see from GPT-4, but the comparison seems disingenuous, and I&amp;#x27;d expect more from someone in academia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>I just tried feeding GPT-4 some assembler as well, and while I did get it to make some optimisations, I also had to point out several mistakes it made (e.g. it moved one instruction to the other side of a label that&amp;#x27;d cause a register to have the wrong value if a preceding branch was taken). It made mistakes that I&amp;#x27;ve seen people new to assembler make, but happened to get some things right. When I pointed out an obvious optimisation it had missed, it applied it &amp;quot;half right&amp;quot; (I suggested it might look at collapsing multiple stack allocations because they didn&amp;#x27;t overlap, but while it collapsed them into a single allocation, it applied the sum of the allocations instead of just the largest one, which was a pointless increase in stack use). Also the kind of misunderstanding I could see with a junior dev with little assembly experience fall for if they recognise what you point to but don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;quite&lt;/i&gt; understand the implications.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;close enough&amp;quot; to be worth trying to see if it hits on something useful, but also bad enough that you really need to carefully scrutinise what it comes up with, and probably need to write a much more comprehensive prompt about strategies it should and shouldn&amp;#x27;t try to apply to make it more generally usable.</text></comment>
<story><title>GPT-4 “discovered” the same sorting algorithm as AlphaDev by removing “mov S P”</title><url>https://twitter.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1666843952824168465</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danpalmer</author><text>The paper shows several distinct improvements to a sorting algorithm, and presents evidence that the process is generally applicable. This tweet points GPT-4 at 20 instructions and asks if any can be removed, and it finds one optimisation.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s good to see from GPT-4, but the comparison seems disingenuous, and I&amp;#x27;d expect more from someone in academia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deelowe</author><text>Agreed. They pointed GPT-4 at the solution and GPT-4 found it. Still somewhat impressive, but not exactly the same.</text></comment>