That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design · HackerPapers discussions

That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by warbaker

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 03:10:07 GMT

Google has responded to this "controversy" already: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/1858540085794451906 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10053

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 18:44:11 GMT

So much wasted time. He even ran a study internally (with Markov), but, as the AlphaChip authors describe: In 2022, it was reviewed by an independent committee at Google, which determined that “the claims and conclusions in the draft are not scientifically backed by the experiments” [33] and “as the [AlphaChip] results on their original datasets were independently reproduced, this brought the [Markov et al.] RL results into question” [33]. We provided the committee with one-line scripts that generated significantly better RL results than those reported in Markov et al., outperforming their…

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 17:34:20 GMT

> it might have a harder time with a chip designed by a third party (further from its pre-training). Then they could pre-train on chips that are in-distribution for that task. See also section 3.1 of their response paper, where they describe a comparison against commercial autoplacers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10053

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 06:25:10 GMT

Pre-training is just training on multiple chips. "If Cheng et al. had reached out to the corresponding authors of the Nature paper, we would have gladly helped them to correct these issues prior to publication" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10053) That's how you actually do a reproduction study - you reach out to the corresponding authors and make sure you do everything exactly the same. But at this point, it's hard to imagine the AlphaChip folks having much patience with them.

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 05:49:26 GMT

You're linking to his amended complaint - his original complaint was thrown out because it alleged things like "Google's motto is don't be evil, but they were evil, thus defrauding me." According to a Google investigator's sworn statement, he admitted that he didn't have evidence to suspect the AlphaChip authors of fraud: "he stated that he suspected that the research being conducted by Goldie and Mirhoseini was fraudulent, but also stated that he did not have evidence to support his suspicion of fraud". I feel like if someone persistently makes unsupported allegations of fraud, they should…

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by vighneshiyer

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 07:17:12 GMT

> One key argument in the rebuttal against the ISPD article is that the resources used in their comparison were significantly smaller. To me, this point alone seems sufficient to question the validity of the ISPD work's conclusions. What are your thoughts on this? I believe this is a fair criticism, and it could be a reason why the ISPD Tensorboard shows divergence during training for some RTL designs. The ISPD authors provide their own justification for their substitution of training time for compute resources in page 11 of their paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.11014). I do not think it…

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 05:02:33 GMT

The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10053

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — HN submission

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 01:26:23 GMT

A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design

3 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by wholehog

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 20:55:07 GMT

The AlphaChip authors beg to differ... https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-alphachip-transfor... https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10053

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — mentioned by negativeonehalf

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:51:12 GMT

Meanwhile Google has already used AI for this exact stage of chip design with AlphaChip: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-alphachip-transfor... And they've responded to the absurd degree of skepticism that followed: "That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10053

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That Chip Has Sailed: A Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design — HN submission

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:07:20 GMT

That Chip Has Sailed: Critique of Unfounded Skepticism Around AI for Chip Design

10 points; 9 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.