Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

In fact, existing algorithms such as naive simulated annealing can be easily augmented with ML (e.g. using state embeddings to optimize hyperparameters for a given problem instance, or using a regression model to fine-tune proxy costs to better correlate with final QoR). Indeed, I strongly suspect commercial CAD software is already applying ML in many ways for mixed-placement and other CAD algorithms. The criticism against AlphaChip isn't about rejecting any application of ML to EDA CAD algorithms, but rather the particular formulation they used and objections to their reported results / comparisons.

For instance:

> Much of this unfounded skepticism is driven by a deeply flawed non-peer-reviewed publication by Cheng et al. that claimed to replicate our approach but failed to follow our methodology in major ways. In particular the authors did no pre-training (despite pre-training being mentioned 37 times in our Nature article),

This could easily be written more succinctly, and with less bias, as:

> Much of this skepticism is driven by a publication by Cheng et al. that claimed to replicate our approach but failed to follow our methodology in major ways. In particular the authors did no pre-training,

Calling the skepticism unfounded or deeply flawed does not make it so, and pointing out that a particular publication is not peer reviewed does not make its contents false. The authors would be better served by maintaining a more neutral tone rather than coming off accusatory and heavily biased.

Cross-posting to a Mastodon account is not that hard.

I look at this from two viewpoints. One is that it's good that he spends most of this time and energy doing research/management and not getting bogged down in culture war stuff. The other is that those who have all this power ought to wield it a tiny tiny bit more responsibly. (IMHO social influence of the elites/leaders/cool-kids are also among those leverage points you speak of.)

Also, I'm not blaming him. I don't think it's morally wrong to use X. (I think it's mentally harmful, but X is not unique in this. Though character limit does select for "no u" type messages.) I'm at best cynically musing about the claimed helplessness of Jeff Dean with regards to finding a forum.

Surely all of the people who did the work that the innovation rests on should be confident they will be relevant, involved, comfortable, and safe in the post-innovation world?

And yet it’s not clear they should feel this way. Luddism seems an unfounded ideology over the scope of history since the origin of the term. But over the period since “AI” entered the public discussion at the current level? Almost two years exactly? Making the Luddite agenda credible has seemed a ubiquitous talking point.

Over that time frame technical people have been laid off in staggering numbers, a steadily-shrinking number of employers have been slashing headcount and posting EPS beats, and “AI” has been mentioned in every breath. It’s so extreme that even sophisticated knowledge of the kinds of subject matter that goes into AlphaChip is (allegedly) useless without access to the Hopper FLOPs.

If the AI Cartel was a little less rapacious, people might be a little more open to embracing the AI revolution.