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AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

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101–110 of 194 posts

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know that's not what I meant. also, avgas.

What did you mean, then? Also, CFCs.

things like the ones I had enumerated in my first comment. I'm old enough to remember FUD about all of those and many others, and perceptive enough to identify many ongoing public opinion campaigns as such.

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#102
One takeaway from the article is that they had to get rid of the tried and tested fundamental building blocks of chip design to generate this advancement. I wonder if the same applies for mundane coding. Are the incredible innovations in AI coding actually hampered by rust and python? Should we let AI tools just code in the lowest level possible?

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#103
post #102

One takeaway from the article is that they had to get rid of the tried and tested fundamental building blocks of chip design to generate this advancement. I wonder if the same applies for mundane coding. Are the incredible innovations in AI coding actually hampered by rust and python? Should we let AI tools just code in the lowest level possible?

I’m intrigued by the question but I do think it has some worrying implications for portability.

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#104
post #93
post #70

One great application of AI design is patent poisoning. Use AI to churn out masses of variant designs, make them publicly visible on a web site, and if future patents come out use any collisions to invalidate them or at least restrict their scope (generalization of a patent is limited by prior art.)

I’m reminded of lawyer Damien Riehl’s (performative) reaction to the Sam Smith infringement decision, back in 2019/2020. He and programmer Noah Rubin algorithmically generated every possible melody (within a certain combinatorial space, in MIDI format as I recall), and purported to release them under CC-0 license [0]. He went on to attract some attention and explain his argument at a regional TEDx event [1]. I seem t…

Copyrights are a bit different from patents.

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#105

> That’s not even to speak of all the movie plots that would have been ruined. I clicked on all the links. Pretty much all of those movies could still work with wired technology. Even the one called cellular, in which a woman is trapped in an attic with a broken landline phone and manages to connect wires and dial a random number. Yes I'm nitpicking. I guess I'm glad we have Wi-Fi and all, but don't try to sell me on…

And what about all the movie plots ruined by the existence of cell phones?

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong - the training data is necessary but insufficient. There are a lot of other parts of the architectures used that add a lot of value - otherwise Markov chains would be all you need. There are layers upon layers with non linear activation functions, learned residuals, etc. They still absolutely must interpolate but the space they interpolate through is much more complex than the training data, and they ca…

the existence of free will is far from settled

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/agency

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#107
post #83

I wonder if our common expectation that true theories somehow had to be beautiful and elegant is going to survive the coming century. What if "real" nature phenomenon were actually best described by horrible mess of impossible equations, that only machines could actually manipulate and reason about ? That would be really sad..

Does the nature look like a horrible mess to you?

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#108
post #18

Reminds me of this old article - https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ One of my favorite little morsels of internet goodness.

I was going to post this as well, its delightful to see that other people enjoy it since it was really mind-blowing when I read it.

It's interesting since I saw another comment near yours that raised the question of robustness of the lab-grown design, which I thought was kind of the most fascinating part of the damninteresting article was the revelation that the evolved programs were inseparable from the single physical FPGA used in the training. Since this RFIC training model employs a simulator, do you suppose that the quirks of the physical hardware on which the simulator runs are sufficiently isolated from the training such that a pair of designs would behave similarly when the simulator was run on distinct hardware? And I guess the even more obvious question is whether a design evolved on a simulator would have any hope of behaving as expected in physical hardware?

My hunch about the latter is no, although it still seems like an interesting study, and I often find myself thinking that really understanding what was going on with the FPGAs might be a prerequisite for really understanding how to master reinforcement learning.

Anyway I'm glad you posted this and if you have any other favorites related to this domain send them my way!

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#109
post #83

I wonder if our common expectation that true theories somehow had to be beautiful and elegant is going to survive the coming century. What if "real" nature phenomenon were actually best described by horrible mess of impossible equations, that only machines could actually manipulate and reason about ? That would be really sad..

It would be really cool. We already know everything at the lowest levels is a probability cloud. There’s beauty and contentment in not really being able to nail anything down for eternity…

Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

#110
post #107
post #83

I wonder if our common expectation that true theories somehow had to be beautiful and elegant is going to survive the coming century. What if "real" nature phenomenon were actually best described by horrible mess of impossible equations, that only machines could actually manipulate and reason about ? That would be really sad..

Does the nature look like a horrible mess to you?

If you’re not being facetious, then the answer is very much a yes.
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