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Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

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Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#141

Post by echelon »

vunderba wrote: post #124
echelon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you realize the sheer scale of people that are working their asses off to leverage AI in their work in creative ways, often times bending over backwards to get it to work.

I spent 48 hours two weeks back (with only a few hours of sleep) making an AI film. I used motion capture, rotoscoping, and a whole host of other tools to accomplish this.

I know people who have spent months making AI music videos. People who painstakingly mask and pose skeletons. People who design and comp shots between multiple workflows.

These are tools.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#142

Post by echelon »

slg wrote: post #120
echelon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The specific phrase used was " everything you see and hear" (emphasis mine). You weren't arguing this would be an optional tool that could be used in the creation of art. You were arguing that this will replace all other art. That isn't an argument that photography is an art equal to painting, it is an argument for it to replace painting.

> You were arguing that this will replace all other art.

The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#143

Post by teleforce »

Too Lazy To Click (TLTC):

TLDR: We test LLMs to figure out how helpful they are for designing a circuit board. We focus on utility of frontier models (GPT4o, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5) across a set of design tasks, to find where they are and are not useful. They look pretty good for building skills, writing code, and getting useful data out of datasheets.

TLDRN'T: We do not explore any proprietary copilots, or how to apply a things like a diffusion model to the place and route problem.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#144

Post by m-hilgendorf »

FourierEnvy wrote: post #19
cjk2 wrote: post #7

Ex 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.

Why do people think inserting an LLM into the mix will make it better than just an evolutionary or reinforcement model applied? Who cares if you can talk to it like a human?

imo, it's the same reason that Grace Hopper designed COBOL to write programs instead of math notation.

What natural language processing does is just make a much smarter (and dumber, in many ways) parser that can make an attempt to infer the intent, as well as be instructed how to recover from mistakes.

Personally I'm a skeptic since I've seen some hilariously bad hallucinations in generated code (and unlike a human engineer who will say "idk but I think this might work" instead of "yessir this is the solution!"). If you have to double check every output manually it's not that much better than learning yourself. However, at least with programming tasks, LLMs are fantastic at giving wrong answers with the right vocabulary - which makes it possible to check and find a solution through authoritative sources and references instead of blindly analyzing a problem or paying a human a lot of money to tell you the answer to your query.

For example, I don't use LLMs to give me answers. I use them to help explore a design space, particularly by giving me the vocabulary to ask better questions. And that's the real value of a conversational model today.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#145

Post by jamesralph8555 »

maccard wrote: post #106
seveibar wrote: post #61

I work on generative AI for circuit board design with tscircuit, IMO it's definitely going to be the dominant form of bootstrapping or combining circuit designs in the near future ( Most people are wrong that AI won't be able to do this soon. The same way you can't expect an AI to generate a website in assembly, but you CAN expect it to generate a website with React/tailwind, you can't expect an AI to generate circui…

> The same way you can't expect an AI to generate a website in assembly, but you CAN expect it to generate a website with React/tailwind Can you? Because last time I tried (probably about February) it still wasn’t a thing

I tried GPT-4o in May and had good results asking it to generate react+tailwind components for me. It might not get things right the first time but it is generally able to respond to feedback well.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#146

Post by seveibar »

crote wrote: post #135
seveibar wrote: post #61

I work on generative AI for circuit board design with tscircuit, IMO it's definitely going to be the dominant form of bootstrapping or combining circuit designs in the near future ( Most people are wrong that AI won't be able to do this soon. The same way you can't expect an AI to generate a website in assembly, but you CAN expect it to generate a website with React/tailwind, you can't expect an AI to generate circui…

The problem is going to be getting those functional blocks in the first place. The industry does not like sharing, and the openly available datasets are full of mistakes. As a junior EE you learn quite quickly to never trust third-party symbols and footprints - if you can find them at all. Even when they come directly from the manufacturer there's a decent chance they don't 100% agree with the datasheet PDF. And good…

This is why me and even some YC backed companies are working toward datasheet-to-component ai. We don’t trust third party, but we do trust datasheets (at least, trust enough to test for a revision)

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#147

Post by vasco »

ziml77 wrote: post #137
echelon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely there's some point where it ceases being a tool though. We can't both be making AIs out to be comparable to humans while simultaneously calling them tools. Otherwise people who commission art would be considered artists using a tool.

Many many successful artists from the Renaissance until today are not actually artists but just rich people with a workshop full of actual artist they commission works from. The rich person curates.

Many times this also happens with artists themselves. After a point, you are getting way more commissions than you can produce yourself, so you employ a small army of understudies that learn your techniques and make your pieces for you. So what you describe has existed for hundreds of years.

A short list could include old ones like Rembrandt or Rubens and a new ones like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#148

Post by [deleted] »

HanClinto wrote: post #63
omgJustTest wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked this question of Duncan Dec 22! If you are interested I highly recommend this + your favorite llm. It does not do everything but is far superior to some highly expensive tools, in flexibility and repeatability. https://github.com/devbisme/skidl

This tool looks really powerful, thanks for the link! One thing I've been personally really intrigued by is the possibility of using self-play and adversarial learning as a way to advance beyond our current stage of imitation-only LLMs. Having a strong rules-based framework to be able to be able to measure quality and correctness of solutions is necessary for any RL training setup to proceed. I think that skidl could…

[deleted]

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#149

Post by aaron695 »

surfingdino wrote: post #45
HanClinto wrote: post #14

This 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…

> 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.

[dead]

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#150

Post by kenjackson »

doe_eyes wrote: post #134
selestify wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But isn't this goalpost shifting actually reasonable ? We discovered this nearly-magical technology. But now the novelty is wearing off, and the question is no longer "how awesome is this?". It's "what can I do with it for today?". And frustratingly, the apparent list of uses is shrinking, mostly because many serious applications come with a footnote of "yeah, it can do that, but unreliably and with failure modes tha…

There are a lot of things where being reliable isn’t as important (or it’s easier to be reliable).

For example, we are using it to do meeting summaries and it is remarkably good at it. In fact, in comparison to humans we did A/B testing with - usually better.

Another thing is new employee ramp. It is able to answer questions and guide new employees much faster than we’ve ever seen before.

Another thing I’ve started toying with it with, but have gotten incredible results so far is email prioritization. Basically letting me know which emails I should read most urgently.

Again, these were all things where the state of the art was basically useless 3 years ago.

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