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317 points laserduck | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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spamizbad ◴[] No.42157629[source]
LLMs have a long way to go in the world of EDA.

A few months ago I saw a post on LinkedIn where someone fed the leading LLMs a counter-intuitively drawn circuit with 3 capacitors in parallel and asked what the total capacitance was. Not a single one got it correct - not only did they say the caps were in series (they were not) it even got the series capacitance calculations wrong. I couldn’t believe they whiffed it and had to check myself and sure enough I got the same results as the author and tried all types of prompt magic to get the right answer… no dice.

I also saw an ad for an AI tool that’s designed to help you understand schematics. In its pitch to you, it’s showing what looks like a fairly generic guitar distortion pedal circuit and does manage to correctly identify a capacitor as blocking DC but failed to mention it also functions as a component in an RC high-pass filter. I chuckled when the voice over proudly claims “they didn’t even teach me this in 4 years of Electrical Engineering!” (Really? They don’t teach how capacitors block DC and how RC filters work????)

If you’re in this space you probably need to compile your own carefully curated codex and train something more specialized. The general purpose ones struggle too much.

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hinkley ◴[] No.42158327[source]
I still have nightmares about the entry level EE class I was required to take for a CS degree.

RC circuits man.

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1. cruffle_duffle ◴[] No.42158616[source]
“Oh shit I better remember all that matrix algebra I forgot already!”

…Then takes a class on anything with 3d graphics… “oh shit matrix algebra again!”

…then takes a class on machine learning “urg more matrix math!”

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2. seanmcdirmid ◴[] No.42159323[source]
EEs actually had a head start on ML, especially those who took signal processing.
3. zahlman ◴[] No.42168517[source]
From my experience, complex exponentials were a much more important fundamental than matrices.
4. hinkley ◴[] No.42175143[source]
I remember vectors in 3D graphics but I don’t recall them in EE 101. maybe I blotted it out.