alt Hacker NewsThere's already some precedent when dealing with humans reverse engineering systems. We use "cleanroom" approaches where the ones doing the reverse engineering are segregated from those doing the later design and development work. Instead of producing a design document based on the thing being studied, the reverse engineers produce a specification from which a new design, untainted by knowledge of the original design, is produced.
People using ML to try and reverse-engineer and create a "clean" version of things will likely need to use a similar approach. You can't ask one LLM to take in a circuit design as input and produce a specification and design within the same context. The resulting design will be at least partially informed by knowledge of the original design. The way to do this safely (potentially still with suits happening, but safer at least) will be to have one execution to produce a specification, and a second fresh execution taking the specification to produce a design. At least then you know your LLM was not aware of the original design.
Of course, LLM agents "cheat", so you'll also want to be careful to ensure a clean environment if you're using an agent that does not provide access to the original design material.
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question to clarify:
If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.
If a windows DLL, distributed without a license that says anything regarding, is it a "clean room implementation" if there is some nonzero chance the source code was leaked into the weights at pre-train time? I guess there should be some sort of method for subpoenaing frontier labs to ask "can you grep for this code in the training set for this model", but that might not be practical or feasible.
> The way to do this safely (potentially still with suits happening, but safer at least) will be to have one execution to produce a specification, and a second fresh execution taking the specification to produce a design.
I have seen Claude literally suggest using a Sonnet sub agent to read source the main agent shouldn't, and have the sub agent describe the "facts and ideas" via markdown to the parent agent thereby maintaining that it is clean room and not, for example, GPL encumbered.
This seems as acceptable as asking a human to do the same. Otherwise, taken to its logical conclusion, if any LLM was trained on GPL software, it cannot be used for non-GPL authoring (and IIUC Claude does offer indemnity for enterprise plans if this is challenged).