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OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

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Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#91

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#92

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

There is a lot of verilog out there, it's pretty feasible that they had AI assistance writing more to design their chip. It doesn't have to be revolutionary, it could just be AI-assisted design and lined up well enough with their operations for a custom ASIC to be worth it.

Also there's some much boilerplate around everything. Writing a testbench with codex is extremely feasible. This is the kind of verifiable feedback loop the agents shine at.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#94
post #68

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

Right. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between: 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) 2) OpenAI designed test/verification models and kernels that could be run on the simulated hardware to test its performance As you and others have said, it's hard to trust when they are happy to write something that could easily only mean the latter…

Perhaps they used gpt 5.5 mini to draft emails. Create a coffee schedule.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#95

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

The hardware description languages (HDL) used in chip development are like programming languages. The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. You don’t need to have separate, specialty models designed for this work to use LLMs in chip design workflows.

Design verification also involves a lot of traditional programming which benefits from LLMs.

So it’s not meaningless at all. You could download some of the open source chip design software today and the LLMs could even help you get started on your own tiny chip if you are so interested.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#96

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

It'd be cool to see more of this type of thing, but I have to imagine the ability for it to be updated to a brand-new model as new models come out is limited. If that is the case, it's going to be an extremely hard sell.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#97
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) The engineers working on the chip used ChatGPT from time to time.

I'd be shocked if it was anything more than this.

Browsing openai's job postings in the past few months is enough to contirm that it's more than this. They are for sure making serious efforts at building ai for chip design.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#98
post #68

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

Right. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between: 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) 2) OpenAI designed test/verification models and kernels that could be run on the simulated hardware to test its performance As you and others have said, it's hard to trust when they are happy to write something that could easily only mean the latter…

> 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)

Chip design languages (HDLs like Verilog or VHDL) are well understood by LLMs. They don’t need specialty tools to use GPT-5.5 or other LLMs with them.

You could even try it yourself with open source chip design tooling if you wanted to see it.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#99

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

It'd be cool to see more of this type of thing, but I have to imagine the ability for it to be updated to a brand-new model as new models come out is limited. If that is the case, it's going to be an extremely hard sell.

A hard sell right now. The rate of change will slow down

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#100

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

It'd be cool to see more of this type of thing, but I have to imagine the ability for it to be updated to a brand-new model as new models come out is limited. If that is the case, it's going to be an extremely hard sell.

I think the model they chose is out of date and hard to sell, but there are plenty of use cases where today's dumb small models are fine. A Qwen 3.5/3.6 or Gemma 3 model on silicon at those speeds would be genuinely world changing even if it's only 1-3B params. Such a model at those speeds will remain extremely useful even over a 5-6 year timespan, I think.

If you consider the places you could deploy it -- with no network access, and at those high speeds... very useful .. for adding vague "common sense" fuzzy thinking to all kinds of applications that right now piss consumers off with poor UX. Esp if the model can do voice-to-text and text-to-speech well (some of the smaller models can)

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