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How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip(spectrum.ieee.org)
51 points by maxall4 2 hours ago | 47 comments
pama an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Having 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.

program_whiz 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

With a few handy tips and tricks from apple insiders. But sure, I guess the LLMs helped too.

karim79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I grow Jalapeños. This conflation of AI and actual chili peppers irks me.

amelius an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers".

frangonf an hour ago | parent | next [-]

As a former EE, attention was all I needed to not get zapped.

cyberax an hour ago | parent [-]

:groan:

karim79 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an excellent comment. I'm still laughing.

Lalabadie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do generative art (no relation to AI prompting). I feel your frustration.

fragmede an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Cryptographers also got the same raw deal with cryptocurrency, and every one just said "crypto?"

monkpit 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

Or cyber…

TomGarden an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh my!

asveikau 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just think of how the people of Xalapa, Mexico feel. They should send them a royalty check.

seanmcdirmid an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Jalapeño also used to be a Java VM written in Java at IBM.

glitchc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Feeling the burn?

smitty1e 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Razengan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> irks me

It's jalapeño grill would you say?

karim79 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure what you're talking about. But I'll tell you, home grown Jalapeño peppers, fermented with 3% salt is the stuff of dreams.

wiml an hour ago | parent [-]

"It's all up in yo' grill, would you say?"

Razengan an hour ago | parent [-]

You know what really grinds my gears? Friction.

chrismarlow9 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

slow claps

honeycrispy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'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?

karim79 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Call it GPTChippomatic or something. Please leave my peppers alone.

Razengan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you not watch the Matrix documentary?

MadrasTh0rn an hour ago | parent [-]

I guess I'll have to

gozucito 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It 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

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.

xpct 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Aw, I was expecting more details but this just seems to be a rehash of what they unveiled a month ago.

amelius 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.

xpct 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers.

If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don't see how new companies could ever enter the market.

Lramseyer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.

There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.

btown an hour ago | parent [-]

Something that I think is fascinating, though, is that labs are no longer beholden to the limitations of commercial design software. Want to replace your simulator and optimizer with a fully custom verifiable stack of Lean proofs of optimality and correctness? Just throw your unlimited token budget at it.

xpct 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't work in the business, but my understanding was that even with these companies' budgets, it's still too expensive to do any kind of verified performance optimality.

bhouston 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.

bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.

nr378 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Qualcomm have an architecture license and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn't too far off the M5 Pro.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...

amelius 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why, 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

wmf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Arm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.

cmrdporcupine an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or 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.

pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I 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.

ramshanker 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So when can we start getting cheap chips? RAM anyone please!

faitswulff 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

Everyone's still bottlenecked on foundries, not designs.

jeffybefffy519 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

Cant AI build foundries?

google234123 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Congrats to the former TPU team

geraneum an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whatever happened with the Apple lawsuit?

muchdoubt 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems 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.

cute_boi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

openai should figure out how to make lithography machine, so ASML don't have monopoly on it.

TomGarden an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The Chinese have been working on EUV for a while

bigyabai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"Reverse engineer this DARPA project, make no mistakes"