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1 karma · joined September 28, 2024
The team that did RL for chips work was at GoogleBrain, and you already pointed out that Google had bad demos. The fact that this team was absorbed into DeepMind does not magically rub the successes of DeepMind onto them.
The RL for chips results were nothing like AlphaGo. Imagine if AlphaGo claimed to beat unknown go players, you would laugh. But the Nature paper on RL for chips claims to outperform unknown chip engineers. Also, imagine if AlphaFold claimed to fold only proprietary proteins. The Nature paper on RL for chips reports results on a small set of proprietary chip blocks (they released one design, and the results are not great on that one). That's where imaginary results come up. One of these things is not like the others.
As for "nobody can re-produce", no, that's not the definition. Imaginary things are not competitive advantage. They are exaggerating, and that's bad. But yeah, that's what companies do, you are right.
Maybe you can make RL work for chip design at some point, but if the paper "polished up some results", why is it still getting any respect? You are right about "appropriate channels", that's what Chatterjee and Kahng tried, but Chatterjee was fired by Google as a whistleblower (red flag!) while Kahng is getting flak even these comments (another red flag!). Where would you look next as an independent observer?