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Right. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between: 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, need
by dofm 4mo ago
Right. 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 4mo ago3) The engineers working on the chip used ChatGPT from time to time.
- Catloafdev 4mo agoI'd be shocked if it was anything more than this.
- changoplatanero 4mo 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 4mo agoImpossible to know. Could be fake/aspirational roles to impress investors with their grand vision.
- NitpickLawyer 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo agoThey have a history of lying and making grandiose claims. It's unreasonable to extend them the benefit of the doubt again.
- reinitctxoffset 4mo 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.
- kdheiwns 4mo agoAsking "why would a company lie?" is probably the funniest thing I've seen all month. Every big company puts out BS nonstop.
- signatoremo 4mo agoDo you have inside knowledge?
- fl4regun 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo agoPerhaps they used gpt 5.5 mini to draft emails. Create a coffee schedule.
- Aurornis 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago[dead]
- smokel 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago> Why is that a bold and unlikely claim? Because they could have offered even slightly more evidence.
- etempleton 4mo agoI feel like they would be very specific if it was no.1.