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YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

(www.zach.be)
320 points laserduck | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 14:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | 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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1. snowwrestler ◴[18 Nov 24 12:51 UTC] No.42171900[source]▶
One great thing about humans is that we have developed ways to be deterministic when we want to. That’s what math is for.

Does an LLM know math? Not like we do. There’s no deductive logic in there; it’s all statistical inferences from language. An LLM doesn’t “work through” a circuit diagram systematically the way a physics student would. It observes the entire diagram at once, and then guesses the most likely next token.