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YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

(www.zach.be)
317 points laserduck | 6 comments | 16 Nov 24 14:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.428s | source | bottom
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klabb3 ◴[16 Nov 24 17:05 UTC] No.42157457[source]▶
I don’t mind LLMs in the ideation and learning phases, which aren’t reproducible anyway. But I still find it hard to believe engineers of all people are eager to put a slow, expensive, non-deterministic black box right at the core of extremely complex systems that need to be reliable, inspectable, understandable…
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1. childintime ◴[16 Nov 24 17:32 UTC] No.42157615[source]▶
You mean, like humans have been for many decades now.

Edit: I believe that LLM's are eminently useful to replace experts (of all people) 90% of the time.

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2. datameta ◴[16 Nov 24 17:38 UTC] No.42157661[source]▶
Change "replace" to "supplement" and I agree. The level of non-determinism is just too great at this stage, imo.
3. beepbooptheory ◴[16 Nov 24 17:40 UTC] No.42157674[source]▶
I don't know if they "eminently" anything at the moment, thats why you feel the need to make the comment, right?
4. layer8 ◴[16 Nov 24 17:42 UTC] No.42157685[source]▶
People believed that about expert systems in the 1980s as well.
5. majormajor ◴[16 Nov 24 18:10 UTC] No.42157904[source]▶
> Edit: I believe that LLM's are eminently useful to replace experts (of all people) 90% of the time.

What do you mean by "expert"?

Do you mean the pundit who goes on TV and says "this policy will be bad for the economy"?

Or do you mean the seasoned developer who you hire to fix your memory leaks? To make your service fast? Or cut your cloud bill from 10M a year to 1M a year?

6. lxgr ◴[16 Nov 24 19:17 UTC] No.42158502[source]▶
Experts of the kind that will be able to talk for hours about the academic consensus on the status quo without once considering how the question at hand might challenge it? Quite likely.

Experts capable of critical thinking and reflecting on evidence that contradicts their world model (and thereby retraining it on the fly)? Most likely not, at least not in their current architecture with all its limitations.