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

Oh my!

Or cyber…

Same

Yeah! Procedural and algorithmic art are two other names you'll see used for the general techniques.

You know what really grinds my gears? Friction.

Thank you.

Feeling the burn?

I guess I'll have to

Call it GPTChippomatic or something. Please leave my peppers alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent

Computing

* Agent architecture, a blueprint for software agents and control systems

* Agent-based model, a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of individuals

* Agentic AI, autonomous artificial intelligence that can make decisions and act on those decisions on its own

* Forté Agent, an email and Usenet news client

* Intelligent agent, an autonomous, goal-directed entity which observes and acts upon an environment

* Software agent, a piece of software that acts for a user or other program

* User agent, software that is acting on behalf of a user

This is an excellent comment. I'm still laughing.

:groan:

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

There is more to this story than meets the eye.

How do super sized supermodels feel about "LLMs"?

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

To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

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

I thought I was in Reddit for a moment.

I mean you can design anything without a license. Selling it is where the problems come up. Even then there are likely places in China that would still make it for you.

Why, the LLM can make up its own architecture.

The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration

There are some investigations starting about this but no rulings yet.

Or they'll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that's fine.

Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc.

It's even just getting space / time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.

Are they using LLMs to close that gap, or is this their Nuvia acquisition doing the heavy lifting?

watt about in performance per watt?

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

And I think correctness for anything near the size of a CPU is off the table.

Yes, they are, but the most important subtasks of designing a CPU are not physics related. They are picking the right parameters for things like: how wide do I make this bus, how many registers do I put in the register file, how large do I make this cache, how deep do I make this pipeline, etc., etc. To find optimal parameters requires a lot of simulations, and humans do this, but LLMs could do them just as well and maybe better because they excel at tedious work.

The right way is to throw LLMs at building tools that reframe the problem into a shape LLMs are good at navigating, and then have LLMs use those tools to solve it.

That's exactly where LLMs can shine, because design space exploration requires tedious work and endless simulations.

That's the sort of the AI (including non-LLM AI) is really good at - even more so than the actual design work.

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.

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.

"Reverse engineer this DARPA project, make no mistakes"

The Chinese have been working on EUV for a while

The successive generations of spaceships won't built themselves. Who will be responsible for setting up real world and software feedback loop?

cant wait for no one to really know whats in chips i mean, even intel hardly knows what all their reserved mem ranges are for. who will decap the chip and see if the docs were right? xD

Haha - understood. Good one!

They'd write a limited test for a feature based on an ask from the software team garbled by a five layer game of telephone. Claim that the module passed validation. A few months later the software folks would have to pull a few all nighters to figure out how to work around the resulting turd during bringup.

Yeah. Just spent an hour planning a closed-loop vision-based extrusion modulation system for 3d printing, with extensive telemetry and offline processing to iterate on the realtime system. Great, like I need another side project.

I had this same thought and think this is a generally interesting direction, but I think we're in a bit of a weird spot where the compute heavy stuff is on GPUs already and most infra stuff is not compute bound (it's often I/O bound or memory bound in some way).

It doesn't help that FPGAs are not made at the same scale as CPUs so don't benefit from the economies of scale.

I'm super curious if you have thoughts on specific pieces of software that would be economically better because I've thought about this in my niche and sort of come to the conclusion that it won't help.

I do think things like SIMD in CPUs will get more use and maybe we will get more difficult to program for CPU features, but I haven't found a use case where off the shelf FPGA components would help with typical software.

“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

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.

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 appears to be about consumer devices, not NPUs or ASICs. If you think Jalapeno stole from anyone it would be Google.

Yes, but the quote about art has nothing to do with that.

The quote says that many artists borrow, meaning everyone still knows who did the original work and the artist is just riffing on it. But great artists transform the work so completely that it becomes theirs.

Is it just me or is this guys posts very much an eye sore?

Worse than llm prose.

billionaires all steal dont try to make good examples from their toxic psycho attitudes.

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.

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.

No, of course not, but it seems less of an obstacle now than it did 2 years ago.

What's your take?

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.

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

Something we can all agree with is we need more foundries and green power.

yup, but it'll take about 3-5 years.

AI can barely fold a shirt

Isn’t this the whole concept for (braces) terafab? Reduce iteration cycle time.

Aw, I was expecting more details but this just seems to be a rehash of what they unveiled a month ago.

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)"

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.

No the math is correct and that is how I understood it as well.

I was sincere, because as you point out, the phrasing is not actually ambiguous here. There is only one way to interpret this that is coherent and sensible. The usual % shenanigans weren't even on the table for me.

Not that I'd have ever seen "reduced by 0.5x" or any other value below 1x, probably for this very reason. What I do see is "reduced to 0.5x", in which case you're supposed to swap the division for multiplication.

Percentages on the other hand are a whole another can of worms, even if these forms are principally interchangeable, and I find them a lot more confusing a lot more often.

Not that this would explain the whole mean/geomean thing.

You're missing the part of your brain that wants to be pedantic more than it wants to understand someone.

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

AI does not make anything new

"I stopped using AI in 2023."

Just like all the current cohort of software engineers will review all of the vibe-coded slop they shovel into their releases. Right……

"reviews"

Do you really think we can sign off on a 100 billion-element analog circuit gifted to us by a malicious adversary?

We can't even keep our own CPU's reliably free of security exploits (Spectre/Meltdown and family); and the only "adversary" there is plain bad luck. Not an active adversary. Yet, all the engineers at Intel/AMD put together couldn't uncover those things before launch.

I emphasize analog because there's classes of circuit bugs (like Rowhammer) where the digital net is correct, and it's weird physics in the analog world that allows privilege exploits, by actors who know where the analog assumptions break down. There was a researcher a few years back—I wish I remembered who it was, there was an HN thread—that demo'd a simple digital circuit with analog gadgets that completely changed what the circuit did, and which were so insidious no human would ever find them.

Of course the slop machine stole the code name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_III#UltraSPARC_IIIi

This is cool. I'm so eager for faster innovation in the hardware space, as opposed to some people's concept of innovation being who can make the most addictive social feed.

while the design aspects have been significantly accelerated and modularized, reducing costs and time to market, i am starting to get a "the cool kids all have their own chips" vibe now like maybe this has gotten too easy.

Next Uber will have its own chips if they dont already.

The math hasn't changed much, betting on software not changing is a pretty bad bet unless your stinking rich or a fool.

Is the chip covered by IP protections