Back in the day you'd write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it's faster to wait.

> “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now”

is the world we live in, planning things while waiting for a more powerful LLM

I optimize a lot of CUDA and it got really, really good at it.

Tried to share and explain that paper to a colleague a few months ago (in relation to discussions about agentic coding and whether you should read the code), and they did not really get why the analogy was relevant outside of compiler-design. I think you overestimate the caliber of the typical working programmer.

The LLM companies, like most SV companies, are just betting on dimness, laziness, and impulsiveness. Not so different from tobacco and alcohol companies.

if they vibe code the chip, but they probably do reviews and verify these are not benchmaxxed

Isn’t that an extremely convoluted path to a goal?

If the goal is getting chip companies to user non-ZDR AI to steal their stuff, why not just have an account exec offer them a massive discount?

Creating PR hype so employees of chip companies read HN and lobby their execs to use AI to get them submitting proprietary information is the Rube Goldberg version of business strategy.

The lawsuit isn't for chip designers, but the consumer product lines. It's possible they also got IP for chips, but that was not brought up.

Yeah, how could those people even think of switching their owners!

This is the part forgotten. Apple is claiming this is their IP embedded on chips that OPenAI stakes the future on. Will they settle?

[flagged]

Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers".

I do generative art (no relation to AI prompting). I feel your frustration.

Just think of how the people of Xalapa, Mexico feel. They should send them a royalty check.

Jalapeño also used to be a Java VM written in Java at IBM.

I'm a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.

Feeling the burn?

I thought I was in Reddit for a moment.

To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

> irks me

It's jalapeño grill would you say?

I'm annoyed that the meaning of the word "Agent" has been obliterated.

Like, why couldn't they invent a new word and not hijack an existing word?

> AI does not make anything new

"I stopped using AI in 2023."

Every time their content appears here, it's a very shallow analysis written for a barely technical audience. And this article is no different, it's just "slop machine wrote verilog; all the hard bits were done by Broadcom, who have access to public AI models (we didn't talk to them and don't know if they used them, but ClosedAI wants us to think they did)"

Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.

There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.

Isn't that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers.

If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don't see how new companies could ever enter the market.

It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.

They won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.

And be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don't think they're worried.

After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they joined w/ apple in illegally fixing wages.

You don't think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn't hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn't if it was merely bad for the world.

Finally, thanks for stating the obvious! I was starting to wonder if I was not going insane.

A team of senior elite chip designers builds something they already know how to build and everyone goes "wow AI be so powerful".

I was surprised to see they were using XLS but then I remembered Chris went there a couple of years ago.

Just a guess, but that case is going to take forever to get through court. The judge recently told both sides to narrow discovery requests, and next month will be another hearing on further discovery disputes.

I'd be surprised if there was any meaningful progress at all in the case before 2027.

> I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024

The papers that use the halting problem or the Gödel's incompleteness theorem to prove something about LLMs are dime a dozen. The problem is they prove their results for any computable system. You need to also believe that the human brain contains "magic" to think that humans are exempt.

I believe I've said the same at the time this paper was published. There is no need for hindsight to notice the problem.

The required amount of compute and training data and whether the existing training methods were up to the task had the real potential to be show stoppers though.

Hallucination is "unsolvable" in the sense that there will always be a non-zero probability of occurrence. Anti-AI folks have ignorantly painted this as the models being fundamentally unreliable, but you also have a non-zero probability of being struck by lightning or eaten by a shark.

> Am I the only one to be surprised?

Did you think RSI cured "hallucination"?

Everyone's still bottlenecked on foundries, not designs.

It's... written right there? Like what?

Suppose you send in your marvelous prompt and hit Enter.

Machine churns for 18 seconds, types out a "reply", then yields back control.

18 / 3.6 = 5

So now the machine will only churn for 5 seconds before yielding back control.

This is confusing how exactly?

Why would an "up to" figure be a mean, or a geometric mean? It's clearly a max, that's why it's called "up to"...

Am I missing something?

Yea. That’s what happens when writers get sloppy.

That odor you are detecting is just good old fashioned bullshit, my friend. It’s just that nowadays everything and everyone is covered in it, and we are not supposed to notice. The emperor has no clothes… and is covered in shit.

The Chinese have been working on EUV for a while

"Reverse engineer this DARPA project, make no mistakes"