Google claims it is using A.I. to design chips faster than humans
Summary
Google claims that it has developed artificial intelligence software that can design computer chips faster than humans can. The tech giant said in a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday that a chip that would take humans months to design can be dreamed up by its new AI in less than six hours. This essentially involves plotting where components like CPUs, GPUs, and memory are placed on the silicon die in relation to one another — their positioning on these miniscule boards is important as it affects the chips power consumption and processing speed. It takes humans months to optimally design these floorplans but Googles deep reinforcement learning system — an algorithm thats trained to take certain actions in order to maximize its chance of earning a reward — can do it with relatively little effort. The AI system was fed 10,000 chip floorplans in order to "learn" what works and what doesnt.