Thomas Ahle: preference

Transcript context

…Meet Thomas Arley. I caught up with him in Zurich, and he's 1 of these rare galaxy brain people who's comfortable in probabilistic machine learning, formal verification, and chip design. However, there's a small problem. When the token god hands you something that looks like it works, how do you know it's actually right? So my background is in theoretical computer science. I used to do algorithms for high dimensional data, locality sensitive hashing. Then I moved to normal computing to develop thermal computing, also to speed up Bayesian intelligence. Sometimes I think about it as the lovable for chip design. So we take it all the way from your intent through the design, through optimizing your design, to formalizing and verifying your design, all the way to tape out. Now I didn't fully appreciate this before. These days, a chip doesn't necessarily start in a factory. It can start as code. So engineers design the whole circuit in a language called Verilog, almost written like software and only much later does any of it become physical silicon. But 1st, that code has to be simulated and formally verified. It has to be proven correct because once a chip is fabricated, if there are any bugs, you're in big trouble. So a few months ago, Thomas blogged about building a Verilog simulator using a swarm of AI agents collaborating with each other and it generated over half 1000000 lines of code in 43 days. Now, the reason he needed to do this is that commercial software costs a ridiculous amount of money and isn't very friendly to using agents. $10,000 per seat or something. Yeah. Per for 1 CPU kernel. If an AI can generate a chip design or a proof or a working program,…

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