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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

If you were to steal a chunk of source code or a binary from meta/Google, you could probably get it running inside a few weeks effort.

Sure, the binary probably depends on a lot of internal proprietary infrastructure, but also most of that infrastructure is easy to write a mock implementation of, as long as you are happy for it to be in-ram, not multi-homed and don't need it to scale to billions of users.

Most of the binaries have a standalone mode for running on a developers PC with few/no dependencies anyway.

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-1: as an ex-googler, I can say it was hard enough for Google itself to get its code to run, given gonzo infrastructure assumptions, proprietary libraries/languages, etc.

That speaks volumes of the code quality @ Google.

sorry, but that's not how code works. It's true that code quality could be terrible but in fact Google is famous/notorious for extreme code review at the line-by-line granularity, plus comments, design docs and more.

The real issues are (again) in dependencies and complex tooling. You can have beautiful code and then in the middle of it, an ML inference call that assumes a crazy ML model and set of hardware to run it on.

You ought to be able to arrive at the same conclusion, then, with these LLMs. Without arrays of GPUs, it would take thousands of years to train one. Without a corpus of billions or trillions of words, one would produce output of very limited utility.

I think you have to consider that some things are systems, and it is the assembly of their components that imparts the true quality.

It's not poor code quality to depend upon available dependencies.

The effort to open source tensorflow was at least a person year worth of work to extract it from google3. Required reimplementing a bunch of stuff.

Good luck even getting a google3-based Hello World to compile. I don't remember the exact numbers, but just #including the most basic libs resulted in a O(100M) binary.

And anything more complex than that would probably have dependencies on so many fat client libs, so much infrastructure, and so many external services, that you'll need months-years to even make sense of them, let alone mock them up.

This is just wrong.

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