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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

#101

Post by ses1984 »

Aurornis wrote: post #95
sharkjacobs wrote: post #61

> 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 som…

The question isn’t whether or not they employed a particular tool, the question is how big of an impact did it have.

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

#102

Post by martythemaniak »

nickpinkston wrote: post #86

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...

In a chatbot, 17k tok/s is a neat but nearly useless showcase. In a coding agent it is a meaningful improvement. In robotics, it could be an absolute revolution.

8B models aren't useful in general, but for specific use cases they can provide an enourmous amount of intelligence - nVidia's Tesla/Waymo competitor is a 7B LLM with a 2B diffusion model, and running that at those speeds could be an order of magnitude cheaper than existing solutions.

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

#104

Post by dpe82 »

Aurornis wrote: post #98
dofm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand why you're getting downvoted.

I've used GPT-5.5 and Opus both for FPGA design with good results. We built a lot of tooling around it to help the models, but even without that they're definitely capable of designing digital logic.

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

#105

Post by figassis »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #61

> 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…

VHDL, VLSI are well documented languages, with well build test and verification frameworks and harnesses. Even just by iteration you could get there if you have the money to pay for it.

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

#106

Post by wmf »

dofm wrote: post #68
sharkjacobs wrote: post #61

> 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…

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3785362

https://developer.nvidia.com/culitho

https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/chip-design/analog-layout-syn...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06415

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

#107

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Although this seems to be for inference itself only and not training but inference is a recurring cost and training is a one time cost and so to me, even if Nvidia still gets moat on training, I don't think that it could ever justify its massive evaluations because for example, some chinese models are actually trained on Non-Nvidia models. The moat in that is incredibly thin.

(at the moment), I think that if I were Nvidia, I would be a bit terrified and I imagine the stock to not be doing super great as I can just imagine everyone online might start talking about it for better or for worse.

I am a bit impressed by OpenAI but is this what can be classified as a plan for OAI to salvage itself and all the commitments it has made nearing a 1.4 Trillion dollars from my memory and this article[0] is from 2025

But could OpenAI simply walk out of its commitments when necessary (for example to Nvidia) if this chip works out or what exactly might happen in the future as these commitments are asked to be paid for, its still smart for OAI to diversify with this chip and to have more deeper ways of revenue than just being a simple middleman but I imagine that Nvidia and others have also invested in OpenAI and they must not be happy with this change.

The thing with AI deals are that they have become so complicated that it is hard for me to find the first order impact of things, let alone second or third order impacts and financial accountability seems to be impacted quite heavily because of all of it and there is some sense that it is done so intentionally.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-has...

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

#108

Post by arcanemachiner »

mikewarot wrote: post #55
some-guy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been eyeing what Taalas is doing [1] by making pure hardware models. The speed is absurd. [1] https://taalas.com/products/

They talk about products, but they don't sell the hardware, thus they don't really have a product, just a service. I know, it's nick picking, but when people can just reach in and take services away, like Fable/Mythos, hardware is the only thing worth buying.

"Nitpicking"
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