Any discussion of evolved circuits would be incomplete without mentioning Dr. Adrian Thompson's pioneering work in the 90's:
Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in awe of the progress in AI images, music, and video. This is probably where AI shines the most. Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines.
> Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines. It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
What I find bizarre is people gatekeeping the process that helps get things from imagination onto canvas.
Artists and "creative" people have long held a monopoly on this ability and are now finally paying the price now that we've automated them away and made their "valuable" skill a commodity.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#123Ex EE here > The AI generated circuit was three times the cost and size of the design created by that expert engineer at TI. It is also missing many of the necessary connections. Exactly what I expected. Edit: to clarify this is even below the expectations of a junior EE who had a heavy weekend on the vodka.
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Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines. It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
These are tools. Humans driving the tools have heart and soul and create things of value through their lens. Your argument rhymes with: - "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough." - "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art." - "Electronic music isn't music." - "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music." - "Digital photography ruins photography." - "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and t…
Just to play devil's advocate - I'm surprised you (and many other people apparently) are unable to tell the operative difference between something like:
1. (real illustration vs digital illustration)
2. (composing on sheet music vs composing in a DAW)
and
3. illustration vs Stable Diffusion
4. composing vs generative music models such as Suno
What's different is the wide disparity between input and output. Generally, art has traditionally had a closer connection between the "creator" and the "creation". Generative models have married two conventionally highly disparate mediums together, e.g. text to image / text to audio.
If you have zero artistic ability, you'd have about as much success using Photoshop as you would with traditional pencil and paper.
Whereas any doofus can type in the description of something along with words like "3D", "trending on artstation", "hyper-realistic,", and "4K" and then proceed to generate thousands of images in automatic1111 which they can flood DeviantArt with in a single day.
The same applies to music composition whether you are laboriously notating with sheet music or dropping notes using a horizontal tracker in a DAW like Logic. If you're not a musician, the fanciest DAW in the world won't make you one.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This feels like an excellent demonstration of the limitation of zero-shot LLMs. It feels like the wrong way to approach this. There is one posted on HN every week. How many more do we need to accept the fact this tech is not what it is sold at and we are bored waiting for it get good? I am not say "get better", because it keeps getting better, but somehow doesn't get good.
That’s a perception and the problem isn’t the AI it’s human nature: 1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there; 2. We are impatient, so our ability to get bored tends to outpace the rate of change.
No I'd say it's that people are very bad at knowing what they want, and worse at knowing how to get it.
While it might be "moving the goal posts" the issue is that the goal posts were arbitrary to start with. In the context of the metaphor we put them on the field so there could be a game, despite the outcome literally not mattering anywhere else.
This isn't limited to AI: anyone dealing with customers knows that the worst thing you can do is take what the customer says their problem is at face value, replete with the proposed solution. What the customer knows is they have a problem, but it's very unlikely they want the solution they think they do.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
No fine tuning needed, as long as the target language/DSL is fairly natural, just give eg a couple examples of tscircuit React, atopile JotX etc and it can generate compliant circuits. It can hallucinate imports, but if you give it an import list you can improve that a lot.
I've found the same thing - a little syntax example, some counter examples and generative AI does well generating syntactically correct code for PCB design. A lot of the netlists are electrically nonsense when it's doing synthesis for me. Have you found otherwise?
Netlists, footprint diagrams, constraint diagrams etc. are mostly nonsense. I’m working on finetuning Phi3 and I’m hopeful it’ll get better. I’m also working on synthesized datasets and mini-DSLs to make that tuning possible eg https://text-to-footprint.tscircuit.com
My impression is that synthetic datasets and finetuning will basically completely solve the problem, but eventually it’ll be available in general purpose models- so it’s not clear if its worth it to build a dedicated model.
Overall the article’s analysis is great. I’m very optimistic that this will be solved in the next 2 years.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a perception and the problem isn’t the AI it’s human nature: 1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there; 2. We are impatient, so our ability to get bored tends to outpace the rate of change.
What goals were achieved that I missed? Even for creative writing and image creation it still requires significant human guidance and correction.
This is a great example of goalposts shifting. Even having a model that can engage in coherent conversation and synthesize new information on the fly is revolutionary compared to just a few years ago. Now the bar has moved up to creativity without human intervention.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am literally right now explaining to a senior exec why some PR hype numbers about developer productivity from genAI are not comparable to internal numbers, because he is hoping to say to his bosses that we’re doing better than others. This is a smart, accomplished person, but he can read the tea leaves. The problem with hype is that it can become a pathological form of social proof.
I see, I'm sorry that's happening :/ I was lucky enough to transition from college dropout waiter to tech startup on the back of the iPad, 6 years in, sold it and ended up at still-good 2016 Google. Left in 2023 because of some absolutely mindnumbingly banal-ly evil middle management. I'm honestly worried about myself because I cannot. stand. that. crap., Google was relatively okay , and doubt I could ever work for s…
Are there any write ups of the newly evil Google experience I can read about? When did things shift for you in the 2016 - 2023 timeframe?
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see, I'm sorry that's happening :/ I was lucky enough to transition from college dropout waiter to tech startup on the back of the iPad, 6 years in, sold it and ended up at still-good 2016 Google. Left in 2023 because of some absolutely mindnumbingly banal-ly evil middle management. I'm honestly worried about myself because I cannot. stand. that. crap., Google was relatively okay , and doubt I could ever work for s…
Are there any write ups of the newly evil Google experience I can read about? When did things shift for you in the 2016 - 2023 timeframe?
No, my way of dealing with it is to whine on HN/twitter occasionally and otherwise don't say anything publicly. Feel free to reach out at jpohhhh@gmail, excuse the overly familiar invitation, paying it forward because I would have found talking about that sort of thing f a s c i n a t i n g.
in general id recommend Ian Hickson's blog post on leaving. I can't remember the exact quote that hit hard, something like decisions moved from being X to Y to Z to being for peoples own benefit.
I'd also add there was some odd corrupting effects from CS turning into something an aimless Ivy Leaguer would do if they didn't feel like finance.
Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
#130This feels like an excellent demonstration of the limitation of zero-shot LLMs. It feels like the wrong way to approach this. I'm no expert in the matter, but for "holistic" things (where there are a lot of cross-connections and inter-dependencies) it feels like a diffusion-based generative structure would be better-suited than next-token-prediction. I've felt this way about poetry-generation, and I feel like it migh…
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