YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

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…

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?

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.

An interpretation that makes sense to me: humans are non-deterministic black boxes already at the core of complex systems. So in that sense, replacing a human with AI is not unreasonable.

I’d disagree, though: humans are still easier to predict and understand (and trust) than AI, typically.