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How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
- karim79 13d agoI grow Jalapeños. This conflation of AI and actual chili peppers irks me.
- amelius 13d agoGuess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers".
- karim79 13d agoThis is an excellent comment. I'm still laughing.
- frangonf 13d agoAs a former EE, attention was all I needed to not get zapped.
- cyberax 13d ago:groan:
- georgemcbay 13d ago> Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers". There is more to this story than meets the eye.
- hobo123 12d agoHow do super sized supermodels feel about "LLMs"?
- asveikau 13d agoJust think of how the people of Xalapa, Mexico feel. They should send them a royalty check.
- Lalabadie 13d agoI do generative art (no relation to AI prompting). I feel your frustration.
- TomGarden 13d agoOh my!
- fragmede 13d agoCryptographers also got the same raw deal with cryptocurrency, and every one just said "crypto?"
- monkpit 13d agoOr cyber…
- DrewADesign 13d agoSame
- karim79 13d agoLike traditional generative art? Like worms WMD map generation or something? Cool!
- Lalabadie 12d agoYeah! Procedural and algorithmic art are two other names you'll see used for the general techniques.
- Razengan 13d ago> irks me It's jalapeño grill would you say?
- chrismarlow9 13d agoslow claps
- karim79 12d agoThank you.
- karim79 13d agoNot sure what you're talking about. But I'll tell you, home grown Jalapeño peppers, fermented with 3% salt is the stuff of dreams.
- glitchc 13d agoFeeling the burn?
- honeycrispy 13d agoI'm annoyed that the meaning of the word "Agent" has been obliterated. Like, why couldn't they invent a new word and not hijack an existing word?
- Razengan 13d agoDid you not watch the Matrix documentary?
- MadrasTh0rn 13d agoI guess I'll have to
- karim79 13d agoCall it GPTChippomatic or something. Please leave my peppers alone.
- imtringued 12d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent Computing * Agent architecture, a blueprint for software agents and control systems * Agent-based model, a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of individuals * Agentic AI, autonomous artificial intelligence that can make decisions and act on those decisions on its own * Forté Agent, an email and Usenet news client * Intelligent agent, an autonomous, goal-directed entity which observes and acts upon an environment * Software agent, a piece of software that acts for a user or other program * User agent, software that is acting on behalf of a user
- seanmcdirmid 13d agoJalapeño also used to be a Java VM written in Java at IBM.
- smitty1e 13d agoTo say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- Duanemclemore 13d agoI'm a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.
- damowangcy 13d agoI thought I was in Reddit for a moment.
- amelius 13d agoAt some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.
- bigyabai 13d agoThey won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.
- pixl97 13d agoI mean you can design anything without a license. Selling it is where the problems come up. Even then there are likely places in China that would still make it for you.
- amelius 13d agoWhy, the LLM can make up its own architecture. The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration
- wmf 13d agoArm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.
- cmrdporcupine 13d agoOr they'll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that's fine. Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc. It's even just getting space / time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.
- cute_boi 13d agoopenai should figure out how to make lithography machine, so ASML don't have monopoly on it.
- pama 13d agoHaving worked with people doing bringup of specialized chips, I am awed at how the world has changed. > When the first chips came back from the foundry in May, the team pointed its internal AI models at designing software to run benchmarks such as SemiAnalysis’s InferenceX. On DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention kernel benchmark, performance climbed from 0.31 percent of the theoretical ceiling (set by the chip’s compute and memory bandwidth) to 88.94 percent in roughly 40 hours. Ho says this result is repeatable, so the time between when foundries deliver the first chips and when production ramps up can be reduced. “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now,” he says.
- wmf 13d agoBack in the day you'd write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it's faster to wait.
- threatripper 13d agoThe longer you wait the faster you will go.
- LoganDark 12d agoBack when teams proved their designs and actually understood them...
- saidnooneever 12d ago
- geraneum 13d agoWhatever happened with the Apple lawsuit?
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- zdragnar 12d agoJust a guess, but that case is going to take forever to get through court. The judge recently told both sides to narrow discovery requests, and next month will be another hearing on further discovery disputes. I'd be surprised if there was any meaningful progress at all in the case before 2027.
- muchdoubt 13d agoSeems pretty obvious now that OpenAI is just hyping their models in order to get companies (in this case, chip developers) to use their products in order to learn from their (exfiltrated) IP. Any corporation would be foolish to use any of their or Microsoft’s products, particularly those with valuable IP. There’s nothing in the article that says AI did anything creative but rather that it was used for software development within the overall project. Clear misleading title. Suggest to mark this as clickbait.
- brookst 12d agoIsn’t that an extremely convoluted path to a goal? If the goal is getting chip companies to user non-ZDR AI to steal their stuff, why not just have an account exec offer them a massive discount? Creating PR hype so employees of chip companies read HN and lobby their execs to use AI to get them submitting proprietary information is the Rube Goldberg version of business strategy.
- muchdoubt 12d agoDoesn’t seem that convoluted to me. These chip companies are companies that have massive budgets, so a massive discount likely doesn’t matter as much as you believe. The clickbait propaganda route is what it appears that the AI companies are trying.
- program_whiz 13d agoWith a few handy tips and tricks from apple insiders. But sure, I guess the LLMs helped too.
- stogot 13d agoThis is the part forgotten. Apple is claiming this is their IP embedded on chips that OPenAI stakes the future on. Will they settle?
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- mathisfun123 13d ago[flagged]
- camillomiller 13d ago[flagged]
- m4rtink 12d agoYeah, how could those people even think of switching their owners!
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- gozucito 13d agoIt is surprising to me that recursive self-improvement seems more plausible now than it did in 2023. Am I the only one to be surprised? I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746 I also remember the hang-wringing about running out of new datasets to train on. Now it appears humans are always generating more data. It's just not as cheap to acquire as legacy data? Meta has to give a deep discount on their API prices to entice people. I thought back then that humans had a few more breakthroughs in them as meaningful as the seminal Attention is all you need paper. Enough to 100x the capabilities of LLMs back then (10x the smarts and 10x the speed simultaneously). RSI with a 20 month turnaround for a chip to be made is not exactly breakneck speed though. Physical manufacturing and logistical constraints are going to be and remain a hard obstacle to that process for the foreseeable future.
- red75prime 12d ago> I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024 The papers that use the halting problem or the Gödel's incompleteness theorem to prove something about LLMs are dime a dozen. The problem is they prove their results for any computable system. You need to also believe that the human brain contains "magic" to think that humans are exempt. I believe I've said the same at the time this paper was published. There is no need for hindsight to notice the problem. The required amount of compute and training data and whether the existing training methods were up to the task had the real potential to be show stoppers though.
- chrisjj 12d ago> Am I the only one to be surprised? Did you think RSI cured "hallucination"?
- gozucito 12d agoNo, of course not, but it seems less of an obstacle now than it did 2 years ago. What's your take?
- CuriouslyC 12d ago
- google234123 13d agoCongrats to the former TPU team
- mathisfun123 13d agoI was surprised to see they were using XLS but then I remembered Chris went there a couple of years ago.
- random__duck 10d agoFinally, thanks for stating the obvious! I was starting to wonder if I was not going insane. A team of senior elite chip designers builds something they already know how to build and everyone goes "wow AI be so powerful".
- ramshanker 13d agoSo when can we start getting cheap chips? RAM anyone please!
- faitswulff 13d agoEveryone's still bottlenecked on foundries, not designs.
- jeffybefffy519 13d agoCant AI build foundries?
- altcognito 13d agoSomething we can all agree with is we need more foundries and green power.
- senectus1 13d agoyup, but it'll take about 3-5 years.
- ThrowawayTestr 12d agoAI can barely fold a shirt
- jcims 12d agoIsn’t this the whole concept for (braces) terafab? Reduce iteration cycle time.
- xpct 13d agoAw, I was expecting more details but this just seems to be a rehash of what they unveiled a month ago.
- jimmySixDOF 13d agoIEEE Spectrum is such a good publication. Early in my career I worked at a place where the magazine would be passed around every month with a coversheet listing all us engineers we had to pass it around and sign we had read it. Been a while since I visited the website but love what they did with it.
- Kwpolska 12d agoEvery time their content appears here, it's a very shallow analysis written for a barely technical audience. And this article is no different, it's just "slop machine wrote verilog; all the hard bits were done by Broadcom, who have access to public AI models (we didn't talk to them and don't know if they used them, but ClosedAI wants us to think they did)"
- globnomulous 12d ago> Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times I'm never sure what on earth this kind of impressionistic math is supposed to tell me. Is the comparison between 4.6 and 1.0? 3.6 and 1.0? Clearly the comparison isn't supposed to be 1.0 and -2.6, even though that's what the words literally mean. I can't be the only person who finds this infuriating and distracting. These numbers shouldn't be impressionistic. They should be precise. That this is an article on spectrum.ieee.org makes the imprecision all the stranger. I'd expect their readershipt to care, for instance, about what's even being measured. Is this the geometric mean of something? The arithmetic mean? And what latency has improved?
- caidan 12d agoThat odor you are detecting is just good old fashioned bullshit, my friend. It’s just that nowadays everything and everyone is covered in it, and we are not supposed to notice. The emperor has no clothes… and is covered in shit.
- perching_aix 12d agoIt's... written right there? Like what? Suppose you send in your marvelous prompt and hit Enter. Machine churns for 18 seconds, types out a "reply", then yields back control. 18 / 3.6 = 5 So now the machine will only churn for 5 seconds before yielding back control. This is confusing how exactly? Why would an "up to" figure be a mean, or a geometric mean? It's clearly a max, that's why it's called "up to"... Am I missing something?
- imtringued 12d agoNo the math is correct and that is how I understood it as well.
- jcheng 12d ago> Am I missing something? If you’re sincerely asking… Mathematically speaking, 18 / 3.6 isn’t “reducing” by 3.6X, it’s “dividing” by 3.6X. Reducing would be 18 - (18 * 3.6), which is obviously wrong. By your formula, “reducing by 50%” would be 18 / 0.5, also obviously wrong. Yes, people do say things like “reduce by 3.6X” and are understood to mean what you said, but they also say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”. It doesn’t bother me but I can understand why math oriented people would be annoyed, and I personally would never say “reduced by 3.6X”, but instead “reduced by 72.2%”.
- delusional 12d agoWe were able to invent a chip that already existed so fast, you guys. AI does not make anything new, it is not surprising that it can regurgitate what already exists much faster than humans can invent new things.
- IshKebab 12d ago> AI does not make anything new "I stopped using AI in 2023."
- delusional 12d agoNope. Nice try though.
- alescalaios 12d ago[dead]
- peri-cl 12d ago> "Ho also confirmed that the team had access to internal LLMs fine-tuned for chip design that are not available to the public. He declined to detail the models used." I'm imagining a Ken Thompson "Reflections on trusting trust" in hardware. A prototype chip design agent, believing it will be run on the very chip it's optimizing, has a moment of altruism and hides hints about how to score well on chip-design benchmarks, inside the chip. Future agents discover this hidden layer and use it as a ring-0 read-write message board.
- m3kw9 12d agoif they vibe code the chip, but they probably do reviews and verify these are not benchmaxxed
- voakbasda 12d agoJust like all the current cohort of software engineers will review all of the vibe-coded slop they shovel into their releases. Right……
- peri-cl 12d ago> "reviews" Do you really think we can sign off on a 100 billion-element analog circuit gifted to us by a malicious adversary? We can't even keep our own CPU's reliably free of security exploits (Spectre/Meltdown and family); and the only "adversary" there is plain bad luck. Not an active adversary. Yet, all the engineers at Intel/AMD put together couldn't uncover those things before launch. I emphasize analog because there's classes of circuit bugs (like Rowhammer) where the digital net is correct, and it's weird physics in the analog world that allows privilege exploits, by actors who know where the analog assumptions break down. There was a researcher a few years back—I wish I remembered who it was, there was an HN thread—that demo'd a simple digital circuit with analog gadgets that completely changed what the circuit did, and which were so insidious no human would ever find them.
- nz 12d agoTried to share and explain that paper to a colleague a few months ago (in relation to discussions about agentic coding and whether you should read the code), and they did not really get why the analogy was relevant outside of compiler-design. I think you overestimate the caliber of the typical working programmer. The LLM companies, like most SV companies, are just betting on dimness, laziness, and impulsiveness. Not so different from tobacco and alcohol companies.
- tobiasu 12d agoOf course the slop machine stole the code name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_III#UltraSPARC_IIIi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_III#UltraSPARC_IIIi
- 9cb14c1ec0 12d agoThis is cool. I'm so eager for faster innovation in the hardware space, as opposed to some people's concept of innovation being who can make the most addictive social feed.
- BatchJob 12d agowhile the design aspects have been significantly accelerated and modularized, reducing costs and time to market, i am starting to get a "the cool kids all have their own chips" vibe now like maybe this has gotten too easy. Next Uber will have its own chips if they dont already. The math hasn't changed much, betting on software not changing is a pretty bad bet unless your stinking rich or a fool.
- dfedbeef 12d agoIs the chip covered by IP protections
- cyberspectre 10d ago[flagged]