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AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design

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161–170 of 194 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could wave a magic wand and just make the word "AI" go away. It has no actual meaning. It could mean anything from your opponent in Mario Kart to Stable Diffusion.

I disagree. AI is doing exactly what it was predicted it would in science fiction. The computer can now literally talk to you in natural language and then perfectly produce sophisticated actions in response to completely arbitrary and unstructured input. It trivially passes the Turing test. By any definition prior to the year 2023 we are living with Artificial General Intelligence and it’s here now.

Current LLMs don't pass the turing test.

Remember, the interrogator is allowed to be hostile, so they would obviously employ all known prompt injections and typical LLM 'gotchas' to figure out who the AI is.

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

#162
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..

I often think this about medicine and the human body. We want to believe that our bodies are some miraculous well oiled machine. But it often seems that it’s a barely held together bag of mess.

No, you just need to be on a regular good maintenance schedule!

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

#163

"Humans couldn't even imagine" seems like overselling it, but I'm sure that machine learning algorithms can brute force their way to chip designs no one has tried before and that some of those might be useful to us. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing for a computer to do.

Here's a story about a genetic algorithm evolving a circuit that works with logic gates that aren't even connected, seemingly by using magnetic flux: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

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

#164
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.)

Wouldn't work. Judges would not treat the AI generated designs as prior art without proof of human involvement (above and beyond entering the prompt).

Maybe not prior art but very much "not novel".

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

#165
post #163

"Humans couldn't even imagine" seems like overselling it, but I'm sure that machine learning algorithms can brute force their way to chip designs no one has tried before and that some of those might be useful to us. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing for a computer to do.

Here's a story about a genetic algorithm evolving a circuit that works with logic gates that aren't even connected, seemingly by using magnetic flux: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

Thanks, I was trying to recall that article. Fascinating stuff to this non-expert.

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

#166

It may come as a surprise, but this phenomenon of "uninterpretable" circuits designed by algorithms is 30 years old now. Adrian Thompson's research in the 90s evolved FPGAs that did signal analysis with bizarre features: - A tiny number of cells (far fewer than expected) - No clock, despite performing signal analysis - FPGA cells that were logically disconnected, but when removed caused the device to stop working Eve…

Those "evolved" FPGAs weren't much of a mystery. They just used undefined parameters (inductive coupling, power supply rail glitching, etc) to achieved the trained outputs. They didn't work when the ambient temperature changed, or when moved to another example of the same FPGA.

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

#167
post #50

If you don't know how it works, then you don't know that it works.

How does your consciousness work?

Utterly haphazardly and inconsistently of course, same as yours. You thought that was some sort of argument? It slots right in and contradicts nothing.

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

#168
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, but I suspect the law might look similarly dimly on the argument that “machines systematically generated all possibilities in the problem space” === “somebody already had this idea.” I’d imagine maybe by reading specific human intention into “prior art ” and “existing work ” and those sorts of terms. Which is not to say let’s not do it anyway and see!

Or they might conclude "even an AI could come up with this, it's obvious". Obviousness is a defense in patent law, not in copyright law.

There is a fairly effective counterpoint here that information is worthless if nobody can find it. Generating a handful of useful designs in a sea of pointless ones doesn’t count as ‘coming up with it’. Remember that a description of every idea already exists in the Library of Babel. I do not think that AI generation without curation really counts as ideation.

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

#169
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..

My suspicion is that we had a sense that generality and compactness was really neat, so we liked easily-remembered laws like F=ma. Applies everywhere, is clean. When you attempt to hyper-optimize, even with humans in the loop, you end up a mess. You're lucky if you can find clean guiding principles anywhere. If you can hyper-optimize hyper quickly, you end up with an extra layer of mess.

Or that tractable models are just more useful than intractable ones even when the latter are more accurate.

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

#170
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're learning that people are way too lax with where they apply the term "intelligent". LLMs aren't remotely intelligent, but people are trying to ride the hype train and call them intelligence.

this is just false. by any meaningful measure of intelligence. the latest models are much smarter than the bulk of the population. how would you define intelligence?

“Intelligence is the ability to learn.”

That is a meaningful measure of intelligence that every LLM completely fails at.

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