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AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'
- andrewfromx 2y agonow we are talking! next level for sure.
- janice1999 2y agoIs this really so novel? Engineers have been using evolutionary algorithms to create antennas and other components since the early 2000s at least. I remember watching a FOSDEM presentation on an 'evolved' DSP for radios in the 2010s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
- happytoexplain 2y agoI don't believe it's comparable. Yes, we've used algorithms to find "weird shapes that work" for a long time, but they've always been very testable. AI is being used for more complex constructs that have exponentially-exponentially greater testable surface area (like programs and microarch).
- xanderlewis 2y agoThis is really interesting and I’m surprised I’ve never even heard of it before. Now I’m imagining antennas breeding and producing cute little baby antennas that (provided they’re healthy enough) survive to go on to produce more baby antennas with similar characteristics, and so on… It’s a weird feeling to look at that NASA spacecraft antenna, knowing that it’s the product of an evolutionary process in the genuine, usual sense. It’s the closest we can get to looking at an alien. For now.
- jhot 2y agoTwo antennas get married. The wedding was ok but the reception was great!
- xanderlewis 2y agoWell done.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nyeah 2y agoYes, for low-frequency analog circuits these experiments go back to the 1990s at least. J. R. Koza, F. H Bennett, D. Andre, M. A. Keane, and F. Dunlap, “Automated synthesis of analog electrical circuits by means of genetic programming,” IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput., vol. 1, pp. 109–128, July 1997. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/4235.687879 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/4235.687879
- Wingman4l7 2y agoThere was also the more relevant (defunct) Distributed Hardware Evolution Project from the University of Sussex, which was using genetic algorithms to evolve circuits: https://wiki.bc-team.org/index.php?title=Distributed_Hardware_Evolution_Project/en https://wiki.bc-team.org/index.php?title=Distributed_Hardwar...
- 1970-01-01 2y agoYes, it's nothing novel. But it is AI adjacent news, so it automagically becomes a headline.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago> AI models have, within hours, created more efficient wireless chips through deep learning, but it is unclear how their 'randomly shaped' designs were produced. IIRC this was also tried at NASA, they used some "classic" genetic algorithm to create the "perfect" antenna for some applications, and it looked unlike anything previously designed by engineers, but it outperformed the "normal" shapes. Cool to see deep learning applied to chip design as well.
- Frenchgeek 2y agoWasn't there an GA FPGA design to distinguish two tones that was so weird and specific not only did it use capacitance for part on its work but literally couldn't work on another chip of the same model?
- robotresearcher 2y agoYes. The work of Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5UOUU7MAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5UOUU7MAAAAJ&hl=en
- isoprophlex 2y agoYes, indeed, although the exact reference escapes me for the moment. What I found absolutely amazing when reading about this, is that this is exactly how I always imagined things in nature evolving. Biology is mostly just messy physics where everything happens at the same time across many levels of time and space, and a complex system that has evolved naturally appears to always contain these super weird specific cross-functional hacks that somehow end up working super well towards some goal
- alexpotato 2y ago> Yes, indeed, although the exact reference escapes me for the moment. It's mentioned in a sister comment: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
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- valine 2y agoI strongly dislike when people say AI when they actually mean optimizer. Calling the product of an optimizer “AI” is more defensible, you optimized an MLP and now it writes poetry. Fine. Is the chip itself the AI here? That’s the product of the optimizer. Or is it the 200 lines of code that defines a reward and iterates the traces?
- trollbridge 2y agoIf you want grant and VC dollars, you’ll rebrand things as “AI”.
- latexr 2y agoSee also: Iced tea company rebranded to include “blockchain” in name, and stocks jumped. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
- scotty79 2y agoThe chip is not called AI-chip but rather AI-designed chip. At least in the title.
- valine 2y agoMy point is that it’s equally ridiculous to call either AI. If our chip here is not the AI then the AI has to be the optimizer. By extension that means AdamW is more of an AI than ChatGPT.
- ulonglongman 2y agoI don't understand. I learnt about optimizers, and genetic algorithms in my AI courses. There are lots of different things we call AI, from classical AI (algorithms for discrete and continuous search, planning, sat, Bayesian stuff, decision trees, etc.) to more contemporary deep learning, transformers, genAI etc. AI is a very very broad category of topics.
- rkagerer 2y agoIn a sense, Adrian Thompson kicked this off in the 90's when he applied an evolutionary algorithm to FPGA hardware. Using a "survival of the fittest" approach, he taught a board to discern the difference between a 1kHz and 10KHz tone. The final generation of the circuit was more compact than anything a human engineer would ever come up with (reducible to a mere 37 logic gates), and utilized all kinds of physical nuances specific to the chip it evolved on - including feedback loops, EMI effects between unconnected logic units, and (if I recall) operating transistors outside their saturation region. Article: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ Paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_Circuit_Intrinsic_in_Silicon_Entwined_With_Physics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_... Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2t5ozk/what_ever_happened_with_the_evolutionary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2t5ozk/wha...
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoI remember talking about this with my friend and fellow EE grad Connor a few years ago. The chip's design really feels like a biological approach to electrical engineering, in the way that all of the layers we humans like to neatly organize our concepts into just get totally upended and messed with.
- pharrington 2y agoBiology also uses tons of redundancy and error correction that the generative algorithm approach lacks.
- remexre 2y agoThough, the algorithm might plausibly evolve it if it were trained in a more hostile environment.
- Terr_ 2y agoIIRC the flip-side was that it was hideously specific to a particular model and batch of hardware, because it relied on something that would otherwise be considered a manufacturing flaw.
- zahlman 2y agoIf we can't understand the designs, how rigorously can we really test them for correctness?
- BoredPositron 2y agoResults?
- evrimoztamur 2y agoCan you always test the entire input space? Only for a few applications.
- BoredPositron 2y agoI am really curious about how you test software...
- AndroTux 2y agoLiterally no piece of software is bug-free. Not one. What are you talking about? Of course it’s impossible to test all inputs, because there’s going to be inputs that you can’t even convince of at the time of designing. What if your application suddenly runs at 1000000x the intended speed because hardware improves so much? How do you test for that?
- BoredPositron 2y agoHardware doesn’t change over time…
- AndroTux 2y agoYes it does. It ages. But even if it doesn't, my point still stands. Or are you insinuating that the engineers over at Intel, AMD and Apple don't know what they're doing, because clearly their CPUs aren't flawless and still have bugs, like Spectre/Meltdown.
- awinter-py 2y ago> The AI also considers each chip as a single artifact, rather than a collection of existing elements that need to be combined. This means that established chip design templates, the ones that no one understands but probably hide inefficiencies, are cast aside. there should be a word for this process of making components efficiently work together, like 'optimization' for example
- fc417fc802 2y agoThis is a strange distinction for the article to point out. If you want to take a more modular approach all you have to do is modify the loss function to account for that. It's entirely arbitrary.
- pmlnr 2y agoThese are highly complicated pieces of equipment almost as complicated as living organisms. ln some cases, they've been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work. Westworld, 1973
- lionkor 2y agoExcept outside of science fiction, it'll just be horribly broken once you put it to use in the real world
- bredren 2y agoThis may have been explored but how much different is this from natural phenomena which we have only theories for their behavior? That is, people have worked with aspects of physics and horticulture to use long before understanding the science. Also, with varying success. Could LLM-generated AI artifacts be thought of in similar lines?
- mprev 2y agoTo be fair, most of the science fiction is about it being horribly broken or, at least, functioning in ways its human stewards did not intend.
- permo-w 2y agoyeah besides the first and last chapters, this is pretty much I, Robot in a nutshell
- pmlnr 2y agothat's basically what the movie is about.
- hinkley 2y agoYul Brynner running around murdering humans.
- deleted 2y ago
- neltnerb 2y agoActual Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1#Fig1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1#Fig1
- choxi 2y agoMaybe we’re all just in someone’s evolutionary chip designer
- DrNosferatu 2y agoIts inevitable: software (and other systems) will also become like this.
- codr7 2y agoAnd then it's pretty much game over.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoIt’s better we [democracies] ride and control the AI change of paradigm than just let someone else do it for us.
- pessimizer 2y ago"Democracy" is just a chant now. It's supposed to somehow happen without votes, privacy, freedom of expression, or freedom of association.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoWell, Democracy is still the least worst of all political systems! But please: would you prefer something else?
- codr7 2y agoThe point is there is no difference except spelling.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoNot game over: it’s just that Engineering will turn into Biology :D
- int_19h 2y agoPsychotherapy, rather, as the natural evolution of prompting.
- mwkaufma 2y ago"In particular, many of the designs produced by the algorithm did not work"
- mikewarot 2y agoI've only started to look into the complexities involved in chip design (for my BitGrid hobby horse project) but I've noticed that in the Nature article, all of the discussion is based on simulation, not an actual chip. Let's see how well that chip does if made by the fab. (I doubt they'd actually make it, likely there are a thousand design rule checks it would fail) If you paid them to over-ride the rules at make it anyway, I'd like to see if it turned out to be anything other than a short-circuit from Power to Ground.
- mng2 2y agoThey do have some measurement results in figures 6 and 7. Looks like they didn't nail the center frequencies but at mmWave it's reasonable for a first attempt -- they're still missing something in their model though, same as if you did it by hand. I'm skeptical that these pixelated structures are going to turn out anything better than the canonical shapes. They look cool but may just be "weird EM tricks", deconstructing what doesn't really need to be. Anyone remember the craze for fractal antennas?
- the_real_cher 2y agoJudging by the code it outputs we need to because I have to constantly fix most code LLMs output.
- coderenegade 2y agoVast chunks of engineering are going to be devalued in the next 10-15 years, across all disciplines. It's already enabling enormous productivity gains in software, and there's zero reason this can't translate to other areas. I don't see any barrier to transformers being able to write code-cad for a crankshaft or a compressor, for example, other than the fact that so far they haven't been trained to do so. Given the extent to which every industry uses software for design, there's nothing to really stop the creation of wrappers and the automation of those tasks. In fact, proprietary kernels aren't even a barrier, because the gains in productivity make building a competitor easier than ever before.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI certainly disagree that it's enabling enormous productivity gains in software. It's a productivity loss to have a tool whose output you have to check yourself every time (because you can't trust it to work reliably).
- coderenegade 2y agoWhen I was studying, I implemented a flight dynamics simulation from scratch, partly as a learning exercise, and partly so that I could have greater control over the experiments I wanted to run. The trickiest part of this was the rotations between the local and inertial frames, which took the better part of a week for me to figure out (especially the time derivative of the quaternion). On a lark, I asked Deep Seek to implement the relevant functions yesterday, and it spat them out. Not only were they correct, they came with a very good low level description of what the code was doing, and why -- i.e. all of the stuff my head was against the desk for while I was figuring it out. If I wanted to implement, say, an EKF tomorrow, I have zero doubts that I could do it on my own if I had to, but I'm also 99% sure Deep Seek could just spit it out and I'd only have to check it and test it. It's not a substitute for understanding, and knowing the right questions to ask, but it is tremendously powerful. For the stuff I'm usually doing, which is typically mathematically demanding, and for which implementation can often be harder than checking an existing implementation is correct, it's a tremendous productivity gain.
- citizenpaul 2y ago>that pitfalls remain “that still require human designers to correct.” In particular, many of the designs produced by the algorithm did not work So? Nothing.
- anshumankmr 2y agoNo wonder YC was looking for startups working in this field.
- morninglight 2y agoThe same comments were made about John Koza's results with Genetic Programming. However, there are some obvious differences between the current model based techniques and Genetic Algorithms. Some feel that the path to AGI will necessarily include a GA component. https://www.genetic-programming.com/jkpdf/gecco2000antenna.pdf https://www.genetic-programming.com/jkpdf/gecco2000antenna.p...
- mupuff1234 2y agoDidn't realize I have so much in common with AI designed chips.
- 6d6b73 2y agoAI designed electronics and software will be security nightmare, at least in the beginning.
- faramarz 2y agoThat's an approach. Just last night I took a similar approach to arriving a number of paths to take when I shared my desired output with a knowledge graph that I had populated and asked the AI to fill in the blank about the activities that would lead a user to my desired output. it worked! I got a few none-corralative gaps that came up as well and after some fine tuning, got included in the graph to enrich the contentious output. I feel this is a similar approach and it's our job to populate and understand the gaps in between if we are trying to understand how these relationships came to existence. a visual mind map of the nodes and the entire network is a big help for a visual learner like myself to see the context of LLMs better. anyway, the tool I used is InfraNodus and am curious if this community is aware of it, I may have even discovered it on HN actually.
- whatever1 2y agoI mean all of the complex operations research optimal solutions are not graspable by human brain. See a complex travelling salesman solution with delivery time windows and your head will spin, you will be wondering how come that solution is optimal. But then you try your rational heuristic and it sucks compared to the real optimal.
- adpirz 2y agoI’ve never been able to put it into words, but when we think about engineering in almost any discipline, a significant amount of effort goes into making things buildable by different groups of people. We modularize components or code so that different groups can specialize in isolated segments. I always imagined if you could have some super mind build an entire complex system, it would find better solutions that got around limitations introduced by the need to make engineering accessible to humans.
- zemvpferreira 2y agoI think it’s half-guess and half-hope but I imagine we’ll spend centuries building really dumb mechanism, then suddenly be completely left in the dust intellectual. I guess that’s what you’d call the singularity. I don’t know if that hypermind will bother designing circuits for us.
- jayd16 2y agoDoesn't need a supermind to prove this is possible. Mere mortals and simple compilers can inline functions and trade abstraction for performance.
- heisenbit 2y agoAn "optimal" solution may do away with "wasteful" abstraction of interfaces and come up with something more efficient. But there is wisdom in narrow interfaces and abstractions. Structure helps to evolve over time which at least for now most computer optimization focuses on getting the best solution now.
- rickdicker 2y agoConway's law goes something like that - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- diabllicseagull 2y agoPieces like this remind me that even professors need to sell what they do, like saying "Humans cannot really understand them." in this case. Never have we ever had more simulation tools and compute power like we have today and we can't understand how these chips really work? I think this is an example of mystifying-for-marketing as used in academia, like portraying this research as some breakthrough at a level that exceeds human understanding. IMHO practitioners of science should be expected to do better than this.
- jampekka 2y agoIt's not necessarily the professor really saying that. Journalists (and university press offices) like to have such lines in pop science articles, and how it goes is that there's an interview from which the writer "interprets" some quotes. These are typically sent to the interviewee to check, but many don't bother to push back so much of it's not egregiously bad.
- pockmarked19 2y agoRecently I was reading about blind people’s experience of Netflix having been poor (no audio descriptions) for years and years and the media never picking it up despite organized groups begging them to do so…until Daredevil was released and outrageous headlines like “blind people can’t enjoy a show about a blind superhero” became possible. And of course, Netflix released audio descriptions post haste once the headlines hit…turns out it was trivial all along. The moral of the story is, if you want it in the press, make it outrageous first.
- aiono 2y agoThat's kind of stuff that really makes me excited about AI.
- myrandomcomment 2y agoAll the way at the bottom after all the amazing claims "many of the designs produced by the algorithm did not work."
- lasermike026 2y agoWhen I see something I don't understand I use AI to help me understand it.
- exabrial 2y agoThis comment (not mine) from the article is absolute Gold: > "Not only did the chip designs prove more efficient, the AI took a radically different approach — one that a human circuit designer would have been highly unlikely to devise." > That is simply not true... more likely, a human circuit designer would not be allowed to present a radical new design paradigm to his/her superiors and other lead engineers. (a la Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, Da Vinci, et-al.)
- p0w3n3d 2y agoI wonder about security of such designed chips. We've been demonstrated that apparently optimal architecture can lead to huge errors that create security flaws (spectre, Pacman for M1 etc).
- calibas 2y agoI think it's pure AI hype to claim these are beyond human understanding, and I doubt that's what the professor really meant. There's real physical processes going on, and we can study them carefully to eventually learn how they work. We just don't understand them yet. It's religion that claims reality is beyond human understanding, it's not something scientists should be doing.
- phendrenad2 2y agoAnd the fact that humans "cannot understand it" means that it's likely overfitted to the job. If you want to make slight modifications to the design, you'll likely have to run the AI tool over again and get a completely new design, because there's zero modularity.
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoThought tiny wireless antennas were already dark magic that people barely understood anyway was more trial and error. Feels like yet another so called science publication doing a clickbait headline.
- pradn 2y agoThere's a great paper that collects a long list of anecdotes about computational evolution. "The surprising creativity of digital evolution: A collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities" [1] https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/26/2/274/93255 https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/26/2/274/93255
- elzbardico 2y agoThey make no mention of the kind of algorithm/model they used. I believe it was not an LLM, was it?
- logicallee 2y agoBut does it work correctly? That's the big problems with AI hallucinations. They're weird and don't work correctly. Our vision for a Utopian state run by autonomous AI's included building a web browser. So we did so. It barely works. Today's write-up: https://medium.com/@rviragh/our-new-ai-generated-browser-barely-works-b3941e407603 https://medium.com/@rviragh/our-new-ai-generated-browser-bar...
- z3t4 2y agoAs I kid I played a competitive text based strategy game, and I made my own crude simulation that randomly tried different strategies. I let the simulation run for a few days with billions of iterations, and it came up with a very good gameplay strategy. I went from being ranked below 1000 to top 10 using that strategy. I also wrote programs that simulated classic game shows like the 3 doors, where you either stay with one door or change door. After running the simulation one million time it ended up with 66% chance of winning if you changed door. The teacher of course didn't believe me as it was too hard a problem for a highscooler to solve, but many years later I got it confirmed by a math professor that prooved it. Computers are so fast that you don't really need AI learning to iterate, just run a simulation randomly and you will eventually end up with something very good. I think this might be a use case for quantum computers, so if you have a quantum computer I'm interested to work with you.
- kccqzy 2y agoIn general I also find middle school and high school math teachers woefully ignorant about Monte Carlo methods.
- karaterobot 2y agoHey, some of us didn't understand regular chips anyway.
- lwhi 2y agoI'm sure AI produced code will be unintelligible to humans soon too.
- sonorous_sub 2y agotool assisted speedrun produces unreadable spaghetti code ship it
- rwj 2y agoAlso see wok done on topological optimization. Mechanical designs no human would design, but AI not required either, just numerical optimization.
- feelingsonice 2y agoWhen r we gonna see these in production and actually used?
- arnaudsm 2y agoI've seen junior code "so weird that humans cannot understand them".
- StarterPro 2y ago"Although the findings suggest that the design of such complex chips could be handed over to AI, Sengputa was keen to point out that pitfalls remain “that still require human designers to correct.” In particular, many of the designs produced by the algorithm did not work– equivalent to the "hallucinations" produced by current generative AI tools." :-|
- pillefitz 2y agoYou're not doing whatever oppressed group you're representing a favor by using weird, alienating pronouns.
- reverius42 2y agoPeople don't necessarily choose their own pronouns based on how it will reflect on an oppressed group, and they don't necessarily intend to be representing a group when representing themselves.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoResistance is futile
- xl-brain 2y agoAs well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole. --The last question by Isaac Asimov
- johnea 2y agoUm, Yea, this is another "works on my desk" type of development. Has anyone considered debug? Of course the bot will do that too, right?
- hydrogen7800 2y agoI remember listening to AM radio late one night in ~2002, maybe Art Bell or John Batchelor, and there was a guest talking about an experiment with, as I recall, mouse brain cells in a petri dish, with electrodes somehow connected to a flight simulator. The cells arranged themselves via some kind of feedback mechanism to takeoff and land a plane in the sim. I never bothered to check if this was some crackpot claim, or legitimate.