←back to thread

YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

(www.zach.be)
317 points laserduck | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 14:07 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
alain94040 ◴[16 Nov 24 16:51 UTC] No.42157355[source]▶
I agree with most of the technical points of the article.

But there may still be value in YC calling for innovation in that space. The article is correctly showing that there is no easy win in applying LLMs to chip design. Either the market for a given application is too small, then LLMs can help but who cares, or the chip is too important, in which case you'd rather use the best engineers. Unlike software, we're not getting much of a long tail effect in chip design. Taping out a chip is just not something a hacker can do, and even playing with an FPGA has a high cost of entry compared to hacking on your PC.

But if there was an obvious path forward, YC wouldn't need to ask for an innovative approach.

replies(4): >>42157791 #>>42157811 #>>42158157 #>>42168449 #
1. bubaumba ◴[16 Nov 24 18:35 UTC] No.42158157[source]▶
> But if there was an obvious path forward

Even obvious can be risky. First it's nice to share the risk, second more investments come with more connections.

As for LLMs boom. I think finally we'll realize that LLM with algorithms can do much more than just LLM. 'algorithms' is probably a bad word here, I mean assisting tools like databases, algorithms, other models. Then only access API can be trained into LLM instead of the whole dataset for example.