Google has been letting an AI lay out parts of its own AI chips. For years. 🤖🧩
Floorplanning (where hundreds of big blocks go on a chip) can take engineers weeks. In 2021 Google's Nature paper treated it like a game: place a block, get a score, learn. A layout in under six hours. In 2024 they named it AlphaChip and said it was used in three generations of TPUs.
The part nobody posts: other researchers tried to reproduce it and argued it doesn't beat strong classical tools. It turned into a years-long public fight, and it's still open.
So is AI designing chips better than humans? We don't know yet.
Comment CHIP and I'll send you the paper and the rebuttal together.
Commented CHIP? No need to wait for a DMThe AlphaChip paper, the rebuttals and Google's reply, in one placeGoogle says an AI has been laying out its TPU chips since 2021. Other researchers say it loses to a 1980s algorithm. Here are both sides' papers, in the order they came out, with what each one actually claims.