Everyone keeps hammering home how much of the process is proprietary. Whose interest is that in though? Is it in Nvidias & Intels & Qualcomm's interest to let these chip design software companies have extremely proprietary cake, that no one can advance or enhance, that has no machine-learning capabilities surrounding it?

To me it feels like so many are missing the picture here. Chip designers ought to cooperate on tooling, to burst exactly this batch of crooks you've just cited's game. Designers should stop being held back by limited, small minded, heavily controlled proprietary software, & collaborate on making a better tooled world we can all openly advance.

Some day I hope we have similar overthrows of ASML & other layers of the stack, as what's happening in chip design now (for basically everyone except nvidia and apple, the two behemoths). Competition & cooperation mixing at various levels is good, is healthy, keeps the world from ossifying.

Edit: oh look, a comment full of these same proprietary chip-design-software companies (not chip-designers) trying to make ML software! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092673