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YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

zach.be

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Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#271

Post by jjk166 »

astrange wrote: post #188
jjk166 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine it is a reasonably straightforward thing to create a simulator that generates arbitrary chip designs and the corresponding verilog that can be used as training data. It would be much like how AlphaFold was trained. The chip designs don't need to be good, or even useful, they just need to be valid so the LLM can learn the underlying relationships.

I know just enough about chips to be suspicious of "valid". The right solution for a chip at the HDL layer depends on your fab, the process you're targeting, what % of physical space on the chip you want it to take up, and how much you're willing to put into power optimization.

The goal is not to produce the right, or even a good solution. The point is to create a large library of highly variable solutions so the trained model can pick up on underlying patterns. You want it to spit out lots of crap.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#272

Post by jjk166 »

duped wrote: post #200
jjk166 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask 100,000 humans each to make a photo realistic rendering of a alpaca playing basketball on the moon in 90 seconds, an LLM is going to outperform every single one of them.

That's not a meaningful benchmark for valuing art or creating art

What meaningful benchmark would you use? Art by it's nature is subjectively experienced - what one person considers great, meaningful, soul-moving art, another may consider terrible, meaningless, and empty. Both opinions are equally valid.

But if you're using AI to create art, you're typically not trying to move someone's soul. You're trying to create a work that depicts something in a particular style with a particular fidelity with a certain amount of resource consumption. That is the only metric by which it makes any sense to evaluate the machine designed to do that specific task.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#273

Post by jjk166 »

foldr wrote: post #236
sincerely wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, most humans can't draw any better than stick figures.

This is true, but humans are much better at including specified elements in an image with specified spatial relationships. A description like a "A porpoise seated at a desk writing a letter" will reliably produce (terrible) drawings consisting of parts corresponding to the porpoise, parts corresponding to the desk, and parts corresponding to the letter, with the arrangement of the parts roughly corresponding to the d…

Humans being better at one specific aspect of a task is not equivalent to humans being overall better at the task.

I just entered your prompt into an AI image generator and in under a second it gave me an image[0] of what looks to me like an anthropomorphic dolphin sitting at a desk writing a letter in a little study. I then had to google what the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin was because I genuinely thought porpoises looked much more like manatees. While I could nitpick the AI's work for making the porpoise's snout a little too long, had I drawn it the porpoise would have been a vaguely marine looking blob with no anatomy detailed enough to recognize let alone criticize. I am quite confident that if you asked for a large number of images based on that prompt from humans, it would easily rank among the best, and it's unlikely you'd get any which were markedly better. The fact it can generate this image nearly instantaneously though is astounding. If your goal was to get one masterpiece hanging in the Louvre, this particular tool would not suffice, but if your goal was to illustrate children's books, this tool could do in hours what would have taken a team of humans months. That is superhuman performance.

[0] https://api.deepai.org/job-view-file/e0b80ca6-d934-42e4-9a7e...

(Sorry if the link doesn't remain good for long)

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#274

Post by therealcamino »

mikewarot wrote: post #195

I agree LLMs aren't ready to design ASICs. It's likely that in a decade or less, they'll be ready for the times you absolutely need to squeeze out every square nanometer, picosecond, femtojoule, or nanowatt. Gary Tan's was right[1] in that there is a fundamental inefficiency inherent in the von Neumann architecture we're all using. This gross impedance mismatch[4] is a great opportunity for innovation. Once ENIAC was…

I find it hard to imagine how you'd implement various simple functions in the bitgrid. It would be interesting if you'd present some simple hand-worked examples.

For example, how it would implement a 1-bit full adder? Like the nitty-gritty details: which input on which cell represents input A, which represents input B, and which represents carry-in? Which output is sum and which is carry-out? What are the functions programmed into each node that it uses?

Then show how to build a 2-bit adder from there.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#275

Post by foldr »

jjk166 wrote: post #273
foldr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but humans are much better at including specified elements in an image with specified spatial relationships. A description like a "A porpoise seated at a desk writing a letter" will reliably produce (terrible) drawings consisting of parts corresponding to the porpoise, parts corresponding to the desk, and parts corresponding to the letter, with the arrangement of the parts roughly corresponding to the d…

Humans being better at one specific aspect of a task is not equivalent to humans being overall better at the task. I just entered your prompt into an AI image generator and in under a second it gave me an image[0] of what looks to me like an anthropomorphic dolphin sitting at a desk writing a letter in a little study. I then had to google what the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin was because I genuinely th…

An AI image generator will sometimes do a good job on this sort of prompt, but it fails in different ways to the ways that humans fail.

Whether humans or AI are better at the task overall is probably too vague a question to answer, depending a lot on how you weight different desirables.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#276

Post by telgareith »

jiggawatts wrote: post #269
mrguyorama wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can absolutely believe that such people didn't learn and remember anything meaningful from those courses. Whether the course is to blame, is far more questionable. It's the same as all the people who say "Why didn't high school teach me how to balance a check book or calculate a mortgage or blah blah?" In nearly every case, they literally did , but you weren't paying attention. You also had to cheat off me to pass…

I keep thinking of a science fiction scenario of being abducted by aliens and then being rescued by alien cops. “Where are you from?” “What’s the chemistry of your required sustenance?” “How long is your sleep cycle as measured with physical time constants?” And similar basic questions could not be answered by 99.9% of the human population. Fundamentally, almost none of us can give an accurate answer to what were mad…

I'll eat my hat if you can answer any of those with enough specificity that "random alien cop"s could produce something useful.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#277

Post by jiggawatts »

telgareith wrote: post #276
jiggawatts wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep thinking of a science fiction scenario of being abducted by aliens and then being rescued by alien cops. “Where are you from?” “What’s the chemistry of your required sustenance?” “How long is your sleep cycle as measured with physical time constants?” And similar basic questions could not be answered by 99.9% of the human population. Fundamentally, almost none of us can give an accurate answer to what were mad…

I'll eat my hat if you can answer any of those with enough specificity that "random alien cop"s could produce something useful.

I'm definitely in the 99.9%, which is more like 99.9999999%. In other words, I doubt there's even 10 people on the planet that would survive that scenario.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#278

Post by fragmede »

jiggawatts wrote: post #269
mrguyorama wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can absolutely believe that such people didn't learn and remember anything meaningful from those courses. Whether the course is to blame, is far more questionable. It's the same as all the people who say "Why didn't high school teach me how to balance a check book or calculate a mortgage or blah blah?" In nearly every case, they literally did , but you weren't paying attention. You also had to cheat off me to pass…

I keep thinking of a science fiction scenario of being abducted by aliens and then being rescued by alien cops. “Where are you from?” “What’s the chemistry of your required sustenance?” “How long is your sleep cycle as measured with physical time constants?” And similar basic questions could not be answered by 99.9% of the human population. Fundamentally, almost none of us can give an accurate answer to what were mad…

Those are interesting questions!

Where are you from is difficult given that we don't know how the alien cop's map is drawn. Third planet from a star shining at 5700K that is 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic center is only slightly more useful than lost kid and saying that their mom's name is mommy.

Chemistry of sustenance. We're carbon based and everything comes from that, but constructing a description of edible food from raw elements is going to take a lot more than drawing some hexagons with C H N and O, along with other required elements. Before we get to food and H₂O though, we'd need an atmosphere to breathe, I wouldn't presume the alien cops know to have an oxygen/nitrogen mix for humans, and not something that's poisonous for humans, like CO.

Time is something that's possible to express though. SI defined the second as a number of vibrations of a Cesium-133 atom, 8 hours of sleep is just multiplication.

Don't think anybody could describe what/where/what to an alien cop that doesn't even speak English to get themselves home or even to not die in an alien atmosphere.

Re: YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

#279

Post by arrakark »

lizknope wrote: post #171

I've been designing chips for almost 30 years. We have a bunch of AI initiatives in my company but most of them are about using Copilot to help write scripts to automate the design flow. Our physical design flow are thousands of lines of Tcl and Python code. The article mentions High Level Synthesis. I've been reading about this since my first job in the 1990's. I've worked on at least 80 chips and I've never seen an…

I've been designing chips for 2 years. One of our very well known third-party IP vendors clearly used HLS. I say clearly, because it was almost a 1:1 translation from OO C++ code, variable names, hierarchies, polymorphism, you name it. Absolutely everything about the Verilog was the complete opposite about how a designer organizes their state machines, etc.

Anyways, their IP very clearly violated the standards of a very well known interface, which could have spelled disaster at tape-out. I had to fight tooth-and-nail, and spent lots of my company's time trying to convince this third-party vendor that this was an actual issue. Only months later were they convinced. The revised code kept coming back and failing interface checks, which shows that they weren't doing these checks on their end. All I could think is, "this can't go well..."

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