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Article yesterday says google uses AI to design chips in 6 hours, sounds like a long way is now yesterday.


> google uses AI to design chips in 6 hours

No, Google's AI is floorplanning[0] (basically routing and layout) human-designed logic in 6 hours. That headline is misleading.

It's kind of like having a compiler will billions of optimization flags and using AI to select a pretty near-optimal set of flags for a particular human-generated source file. We wouldn't call the output an AI-designed program, even though such AI would be really helpful.

Google is using AI as a heuristic for decently fast approximate solutions to the floorplanning problem, where (IIRC) optimal solutions are NP-hard.

It's an important step forward, and presumably a big time saver, but they're nowhere near giving the AI an instruction set spec or examples of inputs and outputs ad having the AI generate the logic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floorplan_(microelectronics)




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