5 ms·
> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimizat
by sharkjacobs 5mo ago
> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models
> the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.
I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors.
Like, if this was as big a deal as it kind of vaguely implies, they would be making a bigger deal of it, right?
- dofm 5mo agoRight. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between: 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) 2) OpenAI designed test/verification models and kernels that could be run on the simulated hardware to test its performance As you and others have said, it's hard to trust when they are happy to write something that could easily only mean the latter but sounds like the former.
- lovasoa 5mo ago3) The engineers working on the chip used ChatGPT from time to time.
- Catloafdev 5mo agoI'd be shocked if it was anything more than this.
- changoplatanero 5mo agoBrowsing openai's job postings in the past few months is enough to contirm that it's more than this. They are for sure making serious efforts at building ai for chip design.
- xnx 5mo agoImpossible to know. Could be fake/aspirational roles to impress investors with their grand vision.
- NitpickLawyer 5mo agoJesus. This is tinfoil hat territory now. Why would they fake something like that? ANY company in this field would try to become free from nvda. Goog has done it already, amazon has their own thing, so it can be done. Not saying they'll 0shot this vertical, but ffs, they don't need to fake anything. They are making an effort, and it would be insane to think they aren't. Might work, might not work, but to even think that the effort is fake is going too far.
- luqtas 5mo agohttps://antoniocortes.com/en/2026/03/10/ghost-jobs-the-economy-built-on-positions-that-dont-exist/ https://antoniocortes.com/en/2026/03/10/ghost-jobs-the-econo...
- NitpickLawyer 5mo agoI'm not saying this isn't a thing. I'm saying oAI doesn't need to fake trying to make a chip or hiring people to make AI better at chip making, or dogfooding or anything like this. It's obvious they're doing it. They'd have 0 reason to fake something like this "for the investors". Come on!
- Planktonne 5mo agoThey have a history of lying and making grandiose claims. It's unreasonable to extend them the benefit of the doubt again.
- reinitctxoffset 5mo agoIt kinda depends on what your prior is. Some companies do a press release and I immediately pay attention or even take action. Other companies? Fool me once Altman, let's see the thing at scale making money. Near frontier AI is clearly relevant to some kinds of logic design, I'm learning some Hardcaml at the moment and yeah, AI is super helpful. Can it leapfrog a company without hardware experience to near the front of the pack of companies with decades of hardware experience? Less obvious. Unrelatedly, would OpenAI dramatically overstate something to manipulate the press and public and capital markets? It's arguably their core competency . AI is going to matter in logic design and synthesis. How much, how soon, and where are open questions.
- signatoremo 5mo agoDo you have inside knowledge?
- fl4regun 5mo agoat the hardware company I work at, people are now using claude code and developing skills for it to do basic stuff like triage or do initial debug on failing tests, search for potential causes in RTL, generate skeleton documentation for designs etc
- dofm 5mo agoBut isn't this rather the ordinary product of an LLM, now? Is it worth the claim that they are making in a press release?
- girvo 5mo ago> Is it worth the claim that they are making in a press release? Definitely, yes, because being vague about it like they have been lets investors fill-in-the-blanks with whatever they want it to mean.
- reducesuffering 5mo agoFrom time to time? Lol you must realize, frontier lab eng are using Codex/Claude-Code 99% in loops, on models the public doesn't have access to. Why? Because it works. Just a matter of time before humans are out of the loop and what comes next is a black hole "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed"
- wongarsu 5mo agoOr OpenAI accelerated the design and optimization process by summarizing emails exchanged during the design and optimization process, or made it possible to ask an AI questions about meeting notes
- scrollop 5mo agoPerhaps they used gpt 5.5 mini to draft emails. Create a coffee schedule.
- Aurornis 5mo ago> 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) Chip design languages (HDLs like Verilog or VHDL) are well understood by LLMs. They don’t need specialty tools to use GPT-5.5 or other LLMs with them. You could even try it yourself with open source chip design tooling if you wanted to see it.
- dpe82 5mo agoI don't understand why you're getting downvoted. I've used GPT-5.5 and Opus both for FPGA design with good results. We built a lot of tooling around it to help the models, but even without that they're definitely capable of designing digital logic.
- dmitrygr 5mo agoMy guess: it is that those who KNOW the subject realize that LLMs suck at it, and those who do not, do not realize it, since their output is plausible, and sometimes even works. This actually plays out across every field and is well documented. An expert can recognize the hallucinations and bullshit coming out of LLMs, while non-experts see plausible output and do not know enough to know it is BS.
- stevenhuang 5mo agoWrong. Myself and colleagues know the subject and they are useful in FPGA design. You should stop hallucinating about topics you don't have experience in.
- dofm 5mo agoYes, obviously. But do we think LLMs without access to proprietary information do a better job with them than Broadcom's human experts or existing proprietary tools at this level of operations? It is still a bold claim and it still needs evidence. We would obviously get a bit more of the evidence if it were to be more useful for the upcoming IPO than this rather open-ended, reinterpretable phrasing.
- wmf 5mo agohttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3785362 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3785362 https://developer.nvidia.com/culitho https://developer.nvidia.com/culitho https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/chip-design/analog-layout-synthesis-ai.html https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/chip-design/analog-layout-syn... https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06415 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06415
- oceanplexian 5mo ago> OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) Why is that a bold and unlikely claim? Are you saying that AI, which has been proven to cure diseases, solve our hardest math problems, write complex computer code and generate entire generated worlds and HD video from a simple prompt would somehow be like, my bad, I guess I can't design chips?
- nullsanity 5mo ago[dead]
- smokel 5mo ago> solve our hardest math problems We're not quite there yet :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
- cess11 5mo agoBecause then they'd likely have stfu and outperformed Intel, Nvidia and AMD, or at least one of them. They're burning more cash than pretty much anyone else and doesn't have anything public that looks like a matching revenue stream so they probably need one very badly.
- dofm 5mo ago> Why is that a bold and unlikely claim? Because they could have offered even slightly more evidence.
- etempleton 5mo agoI feel like they would be very specific if it was no.1.
- nixon_why69 5mo agoThere is a lot of verilog out there, it's pretty feasible that they had AI assistance writing more to design their chip. It doesn't have to be revolutionary, it could just be AI-assisted design and lined up well enough with their operations for a custom ASIC to be worth it.
- KeplerBoy 5mo agoAlso there's some much boilerplate around everything. Writing a testbench with codex is extremely feasible. This is the kind of verifiable feedback loop the agents shine at.
- FanaHOVA 5mo agoNVIDIA already designs most of their chips using AI. Why would you assume it's meaningless marketing?
- nullsanity 5mo ago[dead]
- fecal_henge 5mo agoPerhaps because they are suggesting what they are doing is novel.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agonovel to whom, the reader or the industry? something can be non-novel in the industry, yet novel to the reader, at which point it is useful ... for such readers.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThe hardware description languages (HDL) used in chip development are like programming languages. The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. You don’t need to have separate, specialty models designed for this work to use LLMs in chip design workflows. Design verification also involves a lot of traditional programming which benefits from LLMs. So it’s not meaningless at all. You could download some of the open source chip design software today and the LLMs could even help you get started on your own tiny chip if you are so interested.
- ses1984 5mo agoThe question isn’t whether or not they employed a particular tool, the question is how big of an impact did it have.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 5mo ago> The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. In my experience they are not especially good at SystemVerilog. There's a lot of knowledge about it that is locked behind paywalls and it's very niche. My guess is the "from scratch" here is quite the exaggeration. Otherwise why did they need Broadcom?
- whynotminot 5mo agoDoesn’t Broadcom bring a lot more to bear here than just Verilog? Including relationships with the actual fabricators.
- IshKebab 5mo agoI doubt that is really significant - fabs are happy to work with anybody. What they will likely bring is: * Physical design team (stupidly known as the "backend"). This is extremely specialised knowledge and most chip companies don't really want to have to deal with it if they can avoid it. * IP blocks. Especially for annoying things like phys, memory controllers, USB controllers, PLLs, power, etc. These things are difficult to do, difficult to test, and often critical (good luck if your clock doesn't work...) I would not at all be surprised if Broadcom supplied CPUs too. My total guess at what happened is Broadcom supplied most of a SoC and OpenAI added an LLM coprocessor module to it, and probably asked them to add like 10x more DRAM interfaces.
- figassis 5mo agoVHDL, VLSI are well documented languages, with well build test and verification frameworks and harnesses. Even just by iteration you could get there if you have the money to pay for it.
- seydor 5mo agorealistically, how hard are AI accelerators to design?
- therealcamino 5mo agoUh, pretty hard?
- WithinReason 5mo agoThe hardware? Not too difficult, there are dozens of startups. The software? Only NVIDIA could do it so far sufficiently well.
- sentinalien 5mo agoHow many profitable startups are there?
- WithinReason 5mo ago0 because they lack the software, not the HW. The HW works and is relatively easy to make.
- zgao 5mo agoChip CEO here. It really depends on what "design" or "production" means. Does "design" mean that the design was complete? Does "production" mean the beginning of production, i.e. tapeout? If measuring from RTL-freeze to tapeout, this is a fairly typical (even somewhat unimpressive) timeline (accounting for some unexpected issues) for a large, complex 3nm chip. If measuring from concept (no RTL at all, block diagram of architecture) to tapeout, this is an amazing timeline. The truth is probably somewhere in between. A more concrete statement would use actual technical milestones and gates.
- nonethewiser 5mo ago>If measuring from RTL-freeze to tapeout, this is a fairly typical (even somewhat unimpressive) timeline (accounting for some unexpected issues) for a large, complex 3nm chip. Even for a company’s first design?
- hailwren 5mo agoI don't think you get the newcomer novelty buff when your val approaches 13 digits.
- RugnirViking 5mo agoBig companies are lumbering behemoth, crude assemblages of barely cobbled-together incentives and principal agent problems in a trenchcoat. Getting them to change direction, or worse, try something new at scale, is a massive undertaking
- xnx 5mo agoAlphaChip is what a chip design with AI is. I'm very suspicious that OpenAI has anything like this or they would be bragging about it. https://deepmind.google/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-computer-chip-design/ https://deepmind.google/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-compu...
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoI would assume they've already made as big a deal of it as they can without outright lying too much. Read the rest of the press release. FWIW, Google is now on their 8th generation TPU, having put out the last 4 generations on a 1-year cadence.
- davidpapermill 5mo ago> Google is now on their 8th generation TPU Remarkable that the TPU pre-dates the attention paper. Was a solid bet on energy efficient dense matrix multiplication and has stood the test of time.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoYes, they'd been using machine learning internally since c.2011 with their DistBelief system, which was then replaced with TensorFlow in 2015.
- blitzar 5mo ago> the use of email, spam filters and spellchecker to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process honestly you don't realise how much more efficient it is until you are stuck using the wrong flavour of outlook, the spam filter breaks or sloppy spelling, punctuation and grammar force you to clarify details needlessly.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nickvec 5mo agoI feel like "the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process" just means that engineers were using ChatGPT to sanity check their designs and suggest potential optimizations, though that's just my take (and I'm quite cynical about AI marketing in general!)
- aurareturn 5mo agoBroadcom already has a ton of IP for AI SoCs. I'm guessing the hard parts of this inference chip was already designed by Broadcom and OpenAI simply told Broadcom what it wanted. It's likely very similar to Google's TPU. Early testing shows that the first-generation accelerator will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art What is substantial here? Vera Rubin is shipping in volume later this year and it is expected to be 10x more power efficient for inference than Blackwell.[0] Even if they're already taped out the chip, getting bugs fixed, getting chips manufactured, getting HBM allocation, getting a rack design, hooking them up together, putting them in a data center will likely take at least another 12 months or likely more. By the time this chip is in data centers in volume, they're likely competing against Vera Rubin Ultra or maybe even Feynman. Personally, I don't think OpenAI should have invested in this project. It's too early for them. They should have focused on models like Anthropic and win there. When they're profitable, they can take on these projects. The risk here is very high for OpenAI because AI has a hard cap in energy. If you have a gigawatt, you should only install the best chips. If Nvidia's chips are better, then this is a wasted project and likely wasted billions. [0]https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/scaling-token-factory-revenue-and-ai-efficiency-by-maximizing-performance-per-watt/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/scaling-token-factory-reve...
- cptskippy 5mo agoWhy do you assume Broadcom has a ton of IP for AI SoCs but hasn't done any of the other work around data center scale deployments?
- aurareturn 5mo agoThey have. That's why OpenAI was able to get a working demo in 9 months. But going from a small scale system to a full fledged data center deployment is likely much harder. I don't know how much of the things outside of the chip Broadcom has vs Google's proprietary tech that is not shared with Broadcom. Nvidia's Vera Rubin has 6 unique chips working together in a single rack.[0] [0]https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-32-1-png.webp https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
- SCUSKU 5mo agoMy girlfriend works at Broadcom doing chip design, and based on what she's told me they JUST got claude code like 3 weeks ago, so I really doubt this means anything beyond them vibe coding some scripts or something...
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- napierzaza 5mo ago[dead]
- vanyaland 5mo ago[dead]
- Kiro 5mo agoI think this kind of "hard work" is a perfect fit for AI, and something where the complexity for a human is incorrectly extrapolated to LLMs. Tirelessly wading through heaps of specifications and documentation with very clear goal definitions is hard for a human but easy for an AI. Meanwhile, taking UX and edge cases into account in a business application is easy for a human but hard for an AI.
- u1hcw9nx 5mo agoWritten with AI is the new written in Rust. Both are nonsensical statements and tell noting about the quality of the software. Without context, both are warnings about the quality of the developers.