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Comment by fancyfredbot | Hacker News Reader

The link to SIMD.AI is interesting. I didn't have a perfect experience trying to get Claude to convert a scalar code to AVX512.

Claude seems to enjoy storing 16 bit masks in 512 bit vectors but the compiler will find that easily.

The biggest issue I encountered was that when converting nested if statements into mask operations, it would frequently forget to and the inner and outer mask together.

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Getting an LLM to translate code is very tricky, we haven't included AVX2 and AVX512 yet in our SIMD.ai because it requires a lot more work. However, translating code between similarly sized vector engines is doable when we finetuned our own data to the LLM. We tested both ChatGPT and Claude -and more- but none could do even the simplest translations between eg SSE4.2 and Neon or VSX. So trying something harder like AVX512 felt like a bit of a stretch. But we're working on it.

It used to be the case that if you wanted to write code once and run it on multiple platforms you'd use a library, and if you wanted to avoid writing code which was ISA specific you used a compiler. Now we use an LLM. This is progress. Probably. It's definitely different anyway.

You still have to use the library, and it will still work the same way for normal scalar C code. The whole point is that the vectorization is difficult to write and an LLM just might be able to help with some cases, not all.

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