Google Uses AI to Design Chips, Creating Machine Learning Ouroboros

Google researchers published a new paper in Nature on Wednesday describing "an edge-based graph convolutional neural network architecture" that learned how to design the physical layout of a semiconductor in a way that allows "chip design to be performed by artificial agents with more experience than any human designer." Interestingly, Google used AI to design other AI chips that offer more performance. 

This is a significant advancement in chip design that could have serious implications for the field. Here's how the researchers described their achievement in the abstract of the paper (the full text of which is unavailable to the public) as printed by Nature:

"Despite five decades of research, chip floorplanning has defied automation, requiring months of intense effort by physical design engineers to produce manufacturable layouts. Here we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to chip floorplanning. In under six hours, our method automatically generates chip floorplans that are superior or comparable to those produced by humans in all key metrics, including power consumption, performance and chip area."

The capabilities of this method weren't just conjecture. Google's researchers said it was used to design the next generation of tensor processing units (TPUs) the company uses for machine learning. So they essentially taught an artificial intelligence to design chips that improve the performance of artificial intelligence.

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