Browsing openai's job postings in the past few months is enough to contirm that it's more than this. They are for sure making serious efforts at building ai for chip design.
Other companies? Fool me once Altman, let's see the thing at scale making money.
Near frontier AI is clearly relevant to some kinds of logic design, I'm learning some Hardcaml at the moment and yeah, AI is super helpful.
Can it leapfrog a company without hardware experience to near the front of the pack of companies with decades of hardware experience? Less obvious.
Unrelatedly, would OpenAI dramatically overstate something to manipulate the press and public and capital markets?
It's arguably their core competency .
AI is going to matter in logic design and synthesis. How much, how soon, and where are open questions.