I'm not sure you can call something an optimizing C compiler if it doesn't optimize or enforce C semantics (well, it compiles C but also a lot of things that aren't syntactically valid C). It seemed to generate a lot of code (wow!) that wasn't well-integrated and didn't do what it promised to, and the human didn't have the requisite expertise to understand that. I'm not a theoretical physicist but I will hold to my skepticism here, for similar reasons.

sure, I won't argue on this, although it did manage to deliver the marketing value they were looking for, at the end their goal was not to replace gcc but to make people talk about AI and Anthropic.

What I said in my original comment is that AI delivers when it's used by experts, in this case there was someone who was definitely not a C compiler expert, what would happen if there was a real expert doing this?