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by flumpcakes 372 days ago
I'm not sure this makes sense as a question. Registers are 'controlled' by running code for a given state. An AI can write code that changes registers, as all code does in operation. An AI can't directly 'control registers' in any other way, just as you or I can't.
2 comments
alightsoul 372 days ago
I would like to make an AI agent that directly interfaces with a processor by setting bits in a processor register, thus eliminating the need for even assembly code or any kind of code. The only software you would ever need would be the AI.
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flumpcakes 371 days ago
This makes no sense at all. You can't set registers without assembly code. If you could set registers without assembly code then it would be pointless as the registers wouldn't be 'running' against anything.
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shakna 372 days ago
That's called a JIT compiler. And ignoring how bad an idea blending those two... It wouldn't be that difficult a task.

The hardest parts of a jit is the safety aspect. And AI already violates most of that.

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alightsoul 372 days ago
The safety part will probably be either solved or a non-issue or ignored. Similarly to how GPT3 was often seen as dangerous before ChatGPT was released. Some people who have only ever vibe coded are finding jobs today, ignoring safety entirely and lacking a notion of it or what it means. They just copy paste output from ChatGPT or an agentic IDE. To me it's JIT already with extra steps. Or they have pivoted their software engineers to vibe coding most of the time and don't even touch code anymore doing JIT with extra steps again.
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shakna 372 days ago
As "jit" to you means running code, and not "building and executing machine code", maybe you could vibe code this. And enjoy the segfaults.
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guappa 372 days ago
In a way he's making sense. If the "code" is the prompt, the output of the llm is an intermediate artifact, like the intermediate steps of gcc.

So why should we still need gcc?

The answer is of course, that we need it because llm's output is shit 90% of the time and debugging assembly or binary directly is even harder, so putting asides the difficulties of training the model, the output would be unusable.

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shakna 372 days ago
Probably too much snark from me. But the gulf between interpreter and compiler can be decades of work, often discovering new mathematical principles along the way.

The idea that you're fine to risk everything, in the way agentic things allow [0], and want that messing around with raw memory is... A return to DOS' crashes, but with HAL along for the ride.

[0] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

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flumpcakes 371 days ago
It's not a JIT. A JIT produces assembly. You can't "set registers" or do anything useful without assembly code running on the processor.
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shakna 370 days ago
Riiight... Which was my point? If you want an AI able to set registers, you want to hook it to a JIT. Which avoids assembly by setting machine code directly into memory and executing said memory.
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singularity2001 372 days ago
what he means is why are the tokens not directly machine code tokens
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flumpcakes 371 days ago
What is meant by a 'machine code token'? Ultimately a processor needs assembly code as input to do anything. Registers are set by assembly. Data is read by assembly. Hardware is managed through assembly (for example by setting bits in memory). Either I have a complete misunderstanding on what this thread is talking about, or others are commenting with some fundamental assumptions that aren't correct.
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