Let me say that I like the idea:

- verification

- superoptimization specialized to a particular piece of hardware

- patching binaries while they are running

all great

That being said, I'm getting some weird vibes from the prose on this site. Little phrases and claims that seem intended for the purposes of marketing, but conflate things with clear technical meaning in confusing ways.

For instance: I watched the video ("a code execution model has to be right every time") which implicitly communicates something like "the model cannot hallucinate" ... of course, the agentic LM is still probabilistic, but it is wrapped with verification tools (to reason about semantic equivalence), and is likely post-trained to be good at using those tools.

This strikes me as a conflation between the model and the harness which is intended to strike a marketing point (like: "it doesn't hallucinate") but which is clearly a ridiculous claim to make (falling down the slope: any harness which does error correction for improper tool calls might also be a "model which makes no mistakes")

Also: "self-improving code"

that's not really it, is it? Self-improving code would be code that runs itself and improves itself. This is code I run, which Maxwell watches and improves ... no?

Related: I dislike the usage of the word "model" in the above discussions on the site. Do we want to call everything a "model" now? Can anyone invent a new frontier "model" by post training an agentic LM with tools?

Also, let's say you are optimizing kernels on GPUs. This can be subtly fraught: for instance, it was well-known for awhile that one should only use certain pieces of software (vLLM, for instance) to reproduce papers (which used vLLM) there are non-deterministic sources of randomness (including, of course, floating point) that would prevent one from recovering the performance claimed in a paper ...

Maxwell: A new kind of model that sits between code and hardware