CM AI Smart, Humans Dumb When It Comes to Circuits
February 3, 2025
Anyone who knows much about machine learning knows we don’t really understand how AI comes to its conclusions. Nevertheless, computer scientists find algorithms do some things quite nicely. For example, ZME Science reports, "AI Designs Computer Chips We Can’t Understand—But They Work Really Well." A team from Princeton University and IIT Madras decided to flip the process of chip design. Traditionally, human engineers modify existing patterns to achieve desired results. The task is difficult and time-consuming. Instead, these researchers fed their AI the end requirements and told it to take it from there. They call this an "inverse design" method. The team says the resulting chips work great! They just don’t really know how or why. Writer Mihai Andrei explains:
"Whereas the previous method was bottom-up, the new approach is top-down. You start by thinking about what kind of properties you want and then figure out how you can do it. The researchers trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — a type of AI model — to understand the complex relationship between a circuit’s geometry and its electromagnetic behavior. These models can predict how a proposed design will perform, often operating on a completely different type of design than what we’re used to. … Perhaps the most exciting part is the new types of designs it came up with."
Yes, exciting. That is one word for it. Lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta notes:
"’We are coming up with structures that are complex and look randomly shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance,’ says Sengupta. The designs were unintuitive and very different than those made by the human mind. Yet, they frequently offered significant improvements."
But at what cost? We may never know. It is bad enough that health care systems already use opaque algorithms, with all their flaws, to render life-and-death decisions. Just wait until these chips we cannot understand underpin those calculations. New world, new trade-offs for a world with dumb humans.
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2025
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