alt Hacker News> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models
> the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.
I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors.
Like, if this was as big a deal as it kind of vaguely implies, they would be making a bigger deal of it, right?
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The hardware description languages (HDL) used in chip development are like programming languages. The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. You don’t need to have separate, specialty models designed for this work to use LLMs in chip design workflows.
Design verification also involves a lot of traditional programming which benefits from LLMs.
So it’s not meaningless at all. You could download some of the open source chip design software today and the LLMs could even help you get started on your own tiny chip if you are so interested.
Broadcom already has a ton of IP for AI SoCs. I'm guessing the hard parts of this inference chip was already designed by Broadcom and OpenAI simply told Broadcom what it wanted. It's likely very similar to Google's TPU.
Early testing shows that the first-generation accelerator will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art
Personally, I don't think OpenAI should have invested in this project. It's too early for them. They should have focused on models like Anthropic and win there. When they're profitable, they can take on these projects.
The risk here is very high for OpenAI because AI has a hard cap in energy. If you have a gigawatt, you should only install the best chips. If Nvidia's chips are better, then this is a wasted project and likely wasted billions.
[0]https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/scaling-token-factory-reve...
Right. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between:
1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)
2) OpenAI designed test/verification models and kernels that could be run on the simulated hardware to test its performance
As you and others have said, it's hard to trust when they are happy to write something that could easily only mean the latter but sounds like the former.
There is a lot of verilog out there, it's pretty feasible that they had AI assistance writing more to design their chip.
It doesn't have to be revolutionary, it could just be AI-assisted design and lined up well enough with their operations for a custom ASIC to be worth it.
I feel like "the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process" just means that engineers were using ChatGPT to sanity check their designs and suggest potential optimizations, though that's just my take (and I'm quite cynical about AI marketing in general!)
> the use of email, spam filters and spellchecker to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process
honestly you don't realise how much more efficient it is until you are stuck using the wrong flavour of outlook, the spam filter breaks or sloppy spelling, punctuation and grammar force you to clarify details needlessly.
My girlfriend works at Broadcom doing chip design, and based on what she's told me they JUST got claude code like 3 weeks ago, so I really doubt this means anything beyond them vibe coding some scripts or something...
VHDL, VLSI are well documented languages, with well build test and verification frameworks and harnesses. Even just by iteration you could get there if you have the money to pay for it.
NVIDIA already designs most of their chips using AI. Why would you assume it's meaningless marketing?
realistically, how hard are AI accelerators to design?
I would assume they've already made as big a deal of it as they can without outright lying too much. Read the rest of the press release.
FWIW, Google is now on their 8th generation TPU, having put out the last 4 generations on a 1-year cadence.
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AlphaChip is what a chip design with AI is. I'm very suspicious that OpenAI has anything like this or they would be bragging about it.
https://deepmind.google/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-compu...
Chip CEO here. It really depends on what "design" or "production" means. Does "design" mean that the design was complete? Does "production" mean the beginning of production, i.e. tapeout? If measuring from RTL-freeze to tapeout, this is a fairly typical (even somewhat unimpressive) timeline (accounting for some unexpected issues) for a large, complex 3nm chip. If measuring from concept (no RTL at all, block diagram of architecture) to tapeout, this is an amazing timeline. The truth is probably somewhere in between. A more concrete statement would use actual technical milestones and gates.