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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: 0.254s | source
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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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brookst ◴[16 Nov 24 17:37 UTC] No.42157652[source]▶
You find it hard to believe that non-deterministic black boxes at the core of complex systems are eager to put non-deterministic black boxes at the core of complex systems?
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beepbooptheory ◴[16 Nov 24 17:45 UTC] No.42157709[source]▶
Can you actually like follow through with this line? I know there are literally tens of thousands of comments just like this at this point, but if you have chance, could you explain what you think this means? What should we take from it? Just unpack it a little bit for us.
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1. og_kalu ◴[16 Nov 24 18:49 UTC] No.42158270[source]▶
Because people are not saying "let's replace Casio Calculators with interfaces to GPT!"

By and large, the processes people are scrambling to place LLMs in are ones that typical machines struggle or fail and humans excel or do decently (and that LLMs are making some headway in).

There's no point comparing LLM performance to some hypothetical perfect understanding machine that doesn't exist. It's nonsensical actually. You compare it to the performance of the beings it's meant to replace or augment - humans.

Replacing non-deterministic black boxes with potentially better performing non-deterministic black boxes is not some crazy idea.