YC recently released their latest  Request for Startups, and one specific item has already been getting some buzz in chip design communities. It’s e

YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design - zach's tech blog

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2024-11-16 14:30:15

YC recently released their latest Request for Startups, and one specific item has already been getting some buzz in chip design communities. It’s exciting that an organization as high-profile as YC is taking chip design more seriously… or at least it’s exciting until you actually start reading what their proposal is. Unfortunately, YC seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the key challenges in the world of chip design, and where both LLMs and AI tools more broadly can help.

Design of customized digital systems [...] has typically been costly because of the amount of custom design, development and testing necessary to bring such a system online. With the advent of large language models, these costs are coming down significantly, such that ever more specialized types of computation could be done.

We know there is a clear engineering trade-off: it is possible to optimize especially specialized algorithms or calculations such as cryptocurrency mining, data compression, or special-purpose encryption tasks such that the same computation would happen faster (5x to 100x), and using less energy (10x to 100x).

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