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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Chips design is expensive. Partly because of engineering costs, partly because of manufacturing costs.

If costs go down enough,because of LLM's and possible manufacturing innovations, more chips will be designed, so maybe this will partially offset job loses.

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For each Design Engineer, there are 3 Design Validation Engineers because going to fabrication is very expensive and it is unlike software where you can just do a git push and wait for the CI/CD pipeline to deploy code within minutes at no additional costs.

So let's see.

> more chips will be designed, so maybe this will partially offset job loses.

This is HN mentality. But it is not how it always works. The first thought isn't we can make more money tomorrow by building more faster. It is we can make more money today by laying off all the people that we don't need now. Short-termism is the rule.

I think that’s more the norm in stability, where the economy when not a lot is happening/changing/improving, and so the economy is focused on efficiency as a method of competition. We are squarely not in efficiency mode right now, we’re in explore as fast as possible mode, as a lot of old underlying assumptions have changed, and there’s a huge amount of work to be done in reworking everything for the new assumptions. That means lots of opportunities, lots of money flying around, and bean counters getting outcompeted by people who’re focused on doing new things. Being too conservative does not serve you well in this regime. My two cents, anyway, I don’t think overall massive job losses are on the menu anytime soon, but massive job displacement/swapping, very likely.

The wish granting machine won't need the engineers for that. You'll just end up paying for the devices.

When TSMC capacity is already sold out for a couple of years, and demand just for plain RAM is through the roof, where will these "more chips" be actually fabbed?

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