Google says its AI designs chips better than humans – experts disagree
Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking
2 October 2024 , updated 4 October 2024
Google DeepMind says its artificial intelligence has helped design chips that are already being used in data centres and even smartphones. But some chip design experts are sceptical of the company’s claims that such AI can plan new chip layouts better than humans can.
The newly named AlphaChip method can design “superhuman chip layouts” in hours, rather than relying on weeks or months of human effort, said Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, researchers at Google DeepMind, in a blog post. This AI approach uses reinforcement learning to figure out the relationships among chip components and gets rewarded based on the final layout quality. But independent researchers say the company has not yet proven such AI can outperform expert human chip designers or commercial software tools – and they want to see AlphaChip’s performance on public benchmarks involving current, state-of-the-art circuit designs.
“If Google would provide experimental results for these designs, we could have fair comparisons, and I expect that everyone would accept the results,” says Patrick Madden at Binghamton University in New York. “The experiments would take at most a day or two to run, and Google has near-infinite resources – that these results have not been offered speaks volumes to me.”
