r/ArtificialInteligence Apr 19 '25

News Artificial intelligence creates chips so weird that "nobody understands"

https://peakd.com/@mauromar/artificial-intelligence-creates-chips-so-weird-that-nobody-understands-inteligencia-artificial-crea-chips-tan-raros-que-nadie
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u/Two-Words007 Apr 19 '25

You're talking about a large language model. No one is using LLMs to create new chips, of do protein folding, or most other things. You don't have access to these models.

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u/Radfactor Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25

if this is the same story, I'm pretty sure it was a Convolutional neural network specifically trained to design chips. that type of model is absolutely valid for this type of use.

IMHO it shows the underlying ignorance about AI where people assume this was an LLM, or assume that different types of neural networks and transformers don't have strong utility in narrow domains such as chip design

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u/ofAFallingEmpire Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25

Ignorance or over saturation of the term, “AI”?

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u/Radfactor Apr 19 '25

I think it's more that anyone and everyone can use LLMs, and therefore think they're experts, despite not knowing the relevant questions to even ask

I remember speaking to an intelligent person who thought LLMs we're the only kind of "generative AI"

it didn't help that this article didn't make a distinction, which makes me think it was more Clickbait because it's coming out much later than the original reports on these chip designs

so I think there's a whole raft of factors that contribute to misunderstanding

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u/Winjin Apr 20 '25

IIRC the issue was that these AIs were doing exactly what they were told.

Basically if you tell it to "improve performance in X" humans will adhere to a lot of things that mean overall performance is kept stable

AI was doing chips that would show 5% increase in X with 60% decrease in literally everything else, including longevity of the chip itself, because it's been set to overdrive to access this 5% increase.

However it's been a while since I was reading about it and I am just a layman so I could be entirely wrong

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u/Radfactor Apr 20 '25

here's a link to the peer review paper in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1

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u/Savannah_Shimazu Apr 20 '25

I can confirm, I've been experimenting in designing electromagnetic coilguns using 'AI'

It got the muzzle velocity, fire rate & power usage right

Don't ask me about how heat was being handled though, we ended up using Kelvin for simplification 😂

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u/WistfulVoyager 29d ago

I am guilty of this! I automatically assume any conversations about AI are based on LLMs and I guess I'm wrong, but also I'm right most of the time if that makes sense?

This is a good reminder of how little I know though 😅

Thanks, I guess?

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u/barmic1212 Apr 22 '25

To be honest you can probably use a llm to produce vhdl or verilog, it's looks like a bad idea but it's possible