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YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

(www.zach.be)
317 points laserduck | 5 comments | 16 Nov 24 14:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.879s | source
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spamizbad ◴[16 Nov 24 17:34 UTC] 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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zahlman ◴[18 Nov 24 00:08 UTC] No.42168494[source]▶
I would expect an LLM's internal modeling to be on approximately the level of "this is a diagram of a capacitor circuit for some student's homework; electrical component calculations for homework tend to use the adding-in-reciprocal rule, because simple addition would be too straightforward for homework".

> “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????)

My experience with being an adult, in general, is that many people who went to university don't believe that any given course taught them anything meaningful.

I can absolutely believe that such people didn't learn and remember anything meaningful from those courses. Whether the course is to blame, is far more questionable.

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1. mrguyorama ◴[18 Nov 24 20:33 UTC] No.42176638[source]▶
>I can absolutely believe that such people didn't learn and remember anything meaningful from those courses. Whether the course is to blame, is far more questionable.

It's the same as all the people who say "Why didn't high school teach me how to balance a check book or calculate a mortgage or blah blah?"

In nearly every case, they literally did, but you weren't paying attention.

You also had to cheat off me to pass biology, so I'm going to go ahead and press X to doubt that you "understand the immune system"

We are surrounded by people who failed to invest in their own education, and instead of facing that awful reality, they INSIST that WE are the dumb ones.

It's infuriating.

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2. jiggawatts ◴[19 Nov 24 08:49 UTC] No.42181274[source]▶
I keep thinking of a science fiction scenario of being abducted by aliens and then being rescued by alien cops.

“Where are you from?”

“What’s the chemistry of your required sustenance?”

“How long is your sleep cycle as measured with physical time constants?”

And similar basic questions could not be answered by 99.9% of the human population.

Fundamentally, almost none of us can give an accurate answer to what were made of, where we’re from, or what we need to survive.

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3. telgareith ◴[20 Nov 24 01:54 UTC] No.42190133[source]▶
I'll eat my hat if you can answer any of those with enough specificity that "random alien cop"s could produce something useful.
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4. jiggawatts ◴[20 Nov 24 02:30 UTC] No.42190322{3}[source]▶
I'm definitely in the 99.9%, which is more like 99.9999999%. In other words, I doubt there's even 10 people on the planet that would survive that scenario.
5. fragmede ◴[20 Nov 24 09:24 UTC] No.42192151[source]▶
Those are interesting questions!

Where are you from is difficult given that we don't know how the alien cop's map is drawn. Third planet from a star shining at 5700K that is 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic center is only slightly more useful than lost kid and saying that their mom's name is mommy.

Chemistry of sustenance. We're carbon based and everything comes from that, but constructing a description of edible food from raw elements is going to take a lot more than drawing some hexagons with C H N and O, along with other required elements. Before we get to food and H₂O though, we'd need an atmosphere to breathe, I wouldn't presume the alien cops know to have an oxygen/nitrogen mix for humans, and not something that's poisonous for humans, like CO.

Time is something that's possible to express though. SI defined the second as a number of vibrations of a Cesium-133 atom, 8 hours of sleep is just multiplication.

Don't think anybody could describe what/where/what to an alien cop that doesn't even speak English to get themselves home or even to not die in an alien atmosphere.