> If AI can take all the crap code humans are writing and make it better, that sounds like a huge win.

This sort of misunderstanding of achievements is what keeps driving the AI mania. The AI generated an algorithm for optimizing a well-defined, bounded mathematical problem that marginally beat the human-written algorithms.

This AI can't do what you're hyping it up to do because software optimization is a different kind of optimization problem - it's complex, underspecified, and it doesn't have general algorithmic solutions.

LLM may play a significant role in optimizing software some day but it's not going to have much in common with optimization in a mathematical sense so this achievement doesn't get us any closer to that goal.