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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: 0.214s | source
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fsndz ◴[16 Nov 24 17:05 UTC] No.42157451[source]▶
They want to throw LLMs at everything even if it does not make sense. Same is true for all the AI agent craze: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/langchains-s...
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ReptileMan ◴[16 Nov 24 17:38 UTC] No.42157658[source]▶
Isn't that the case with every new tech. There was a time in which people tried to cook everything in a microwave
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ksynwa ◴[16 Nov 24 17:52 UTC] No.42157765[source]▶
Microwave sellers did not become trillion dollar companies off that hype
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ReptileMan ◴[16 Nov 24 17:55 UTC] No.42157784[source]▶
Mostly because the marginal cost of microwaves was not close to zero.
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ksynwa ◴[16 Nov 24 18:13 UTC] No.42157935[source]▶
Mostly because they were not making claims that sentient microwaves that would cook your food for you were just around the corner which then the most respected media outlets parroted uncritically.
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rsynnott ◴[16 Nov 24 18:37 UTC] No.42158168[source]▶
I mean, they were at one point making pretty extravagant claims about microwaves, but to a less credulous audience. Trouble with LLMs is that they look like magic if you don’t look too hard, particularly to laypeople. It’s far easier to buy into a narrative that they actually _are_ magic, or will become so.
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1. lxgr ◴[16 Nov 24 19:09 UTC] No.42158439[source]▶
I feel like what makes this a bit different from just regular old sufficiently advanced technology is the combination of two things:

- LLMs are extremely competent at surface-level pattern matching and manipulation of the type we'd previously assumed that only AGI would be able to do.

- A large fraction of tasks (and by extension jobs) that we used to, and largely still do, consider to be "knowledge work", i.e. requiring a high level of skill and intelligence, are in fact surface-level pattern matching and manipulation.

Reconciling these facts raises some uncomfortable implications, and calling LLMs "actually intelligent" lets us avoid these.