To be fair, it is fairly good at selecting and optimizing algorithms; as long as you set up a set of correctness tests and performance benchmarks it can use to evaluate if it’s doing well.
The other day in about half an hour I got a 26,000% improvement in performance on a specific algorithm which I had implemented as it was published in the original paper. Same results under all conditions, but it decided to rearrange the formula to use a few matrix tricks and optimized for SIMD instructions. That is the kind of things I’d never do myself: I don’t care if such calculation takes 3 weeks using 256 cores and 200 GB of memory, if I have to optimize for SIMD instructions that will likely take me one or two weeks and I don’t have time for that. I’d rather burn compute. If it takes me a couple hours I’m very happy to bring down a computation which would take weeks to an hour or so.
To be fair, it is fairly good at selecting and optimizing algorithms; as long as you set up a set of correctness tests and performance benchmarks it can use to evaluate if it’s doing well. The other day in about half an hour I got a 26,000% improvement in performance on a specific algorithm which I had implemented as it was published in the original paper. Same results under all conditions, but it decided to rearrange the formula to use a few matrix tricks and optimized for SIMD instructions. That is the kind of things I’d never do myself: I don’t care if such calculation takes 3 weeks using 256 cores and 200 GB of memory, if I have to optimize for SIMD instructions that will likely take me one or two weeks and I don’t have time for that. I’d rather burn compute. If it takes me a couple hours I’m very happy to bring down a computation which would take weeks to an hour or so.