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Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

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Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#151

Post by selestify »

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…

IMO it’s not wrong to want the next improvement (“…but without making up dangerous nonsense”), but it is disingenuous to pretend as if there hasn’t already been a huge leap in capabilities. It’s like being unimpressed with the Wright brothers’ flight because nobody has figured out commercial air travel yet.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#152

Post by neltnerb »

DHaldane wrote: post #54
neltnerb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only bit that looked handy in there would be if it could parse PDF datasheets and help you sort them by some hidden parameter. If I give it 100 datasheets for microphones it really should be able to sort them by mechanical height. Maybe I'm too optimistic. The number of times I've had to entirely redo a circuit because of one misplaced connection, yeah, none of those circuits worked for any price before I…

Agree that PDF digesting was the most useful. I think Gemini could definitely do that microphone study. Good test case! I remember spending 8 hours on DigiKey in the bad old times, looking for an audio jack that was 0.5mm shorter.

Hah, you're not kidding. Literally my comment was inspired by a recent realization that it is not possible to search for a RF connector by footprint size.

That's absurd to me, it took so long to figure out which random sequence of letters was the smallest in overall PCB footprint.

Maybe we found it, we think it's the AYU2T-1B-GA-GA-ETY(HF) but sure would be nice if Digikey had a search by footprint dimensions.

Yet strangely the physical ability of a device to fit into a location you need it is not in the list of things I can search. Takes ten seconds to find the numbers -- after I download and open the PDF file.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/coaxial-connector...

Just so strange, but so common. And digikey is heads and shoulders above average, McMaster might be the only better one I know of at it and they're very curated.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#153

Post by thechao »

m-hilgendorf wrote: post #144
FourierEnvy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you've nailed a subtly — and a major doubt — I've been been trying to articulate about code helpers from LLMs from day one: the difficulty in programming is reducing a natural language problem to (essentially) a proof. I suspect LLM's are great at transferring style between two sentences, but I don't think that's the same as proof generation! I know work is being done I this area, but the results I've seen have been weird. Maybe transferring style won't work for math as easily as it does for spoken language.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#154

Post by thechao »

moffkalast wrote: post #26
guidoism wrote: post #24

This reminds me of my professor's (probably very poor) description of NP-complete problems where the computer would provide an answer that may or may not be correct and you just had to check that it was correct and you do test for correctness in polynomial time. It kind of grosses me out that we are entering a world where programming could be just testing (to me) random permutations of programs for correctness.

Well we had to keep increasing inefficiency somehow, right? Otherwise how would Wirth's law continue to hold?

Most of the HW engineers I work with consider the webstack to be far more efficient than the HW-synthesis stack; ie, there's more room for improvement in HW implementation than in SW optimization.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#155

Post by surfingdino »

exe34 wrote: post #65
surfingdino wrote: post #45

Earlier 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.

how long does it take for a child to start doing surgery? publishing novel theorems? how long has the humble transformer been around?

Nobody is telling an experienced heart surgeon to step aside and let a child plan an open heart surgery. And yet, AI and LLMs in particular are being sold as the tools that can do complex tasks like that. But let's leave complex tasks and have a look at marketing behind one of the tools that's aimed at business. The messaging of one of the ads I'm seeing promises that the tools in question can summarise a 150-page long document into a 5-slide presentation. Now, that sounds amazing, if we ignore the fact that a person who wrote a 150-page document has already prepared an outline and is perfectly capable of summarising each section of the document. Writing a 150-page document without a plan and not being able to organise would mean that people have evolved into content generators that need machines to help them write tables of contents and reformat them into a presentation. Coming back to your child analogy, why would a child be better at summarising content it knows nothing about that the person who wrote it?

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#156

Post by surfingdino »

slg wrote: post #86
makk wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

I don’t think the problem is moving the goalposts, but rather there are no actual goalposts. Advocates for this technology imply it can do anything either because they believe it will be true in the near future or they just want others to believe it for a wide range of reasons including to get rich of it. Therefore the general public has no real idea what the ideal use cases are for this technology in its current sta…

One of the main issues I see amongst advocates of AI is that they cannot quantify the benefits and ignore provable failings of AI.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#157

Post by 127 »

selestify wrote: post #127
127 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it's not. You can not shift goalposts that do not exist in the first place.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#158

Post by surfingdino »

selestify wrote: post #151
doe_eyes wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMO it’s not wrong to want the next improvement (“…but without making up dangerous nonsense”), but it is disingenuous to pretend as if there hasn’t already been a huge leap in capabilities. It’s like being unimpressed with the Wright brothers’ flight because nobody has figured out commercial air travel yet.

The leap has indeed been huge, but it's still not useful for any anything. The Wright brothers did not start a passenger airline after the first try.

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#159

Post by maccard »

jamesralph8555 wrote: post #145
maccard wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s not the same as generating a website though. You still need to iterate on the components, and use them.

I agree that using llms for generating things like schemas, components, build scripts etc is a good use of the technology, but we’re no closer to saying “make a saas landing page for X using vercel” and having it ready to deploy, then we were a year ago

Re: Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

#160

Post by maccard »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #132
maccard wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Depends on the website, right. Because a single index.html can easily be a website which it cam generate.

I mean, yeah. But that’s not exactly helpful. Technically a web server can serve plain text which your browser will render so that meets the definition for most people.

I don’t think pedantry helps here, it doesn’t add to the conversation at all.

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