Google says its AI designs chips better than humans – experts disagree

Can AI design a chip that's more efficient than human-made ones? Google DeepMind says its artificial intelligence has helped design chips that are already being used in data centres and even smartphones. But some chip design experts are sceptical of the company's claims that such AI can plan new chip layouts better than humans can. The newly named AlphaChip method can design "superhuman chip layouts" in hours, rather than relying on weeks or months of human effort, said Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, researchers at Google DeepMind, in a blog post. This AI approach uses reinforcement learning to figure out the relationships among chip components and gets rewarded based on the final layout quality.