Superhuman AI Can Design Hardware—Building It Is the Hard Part
Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part
Frontier models can now generate CAD, design custom PCBs, and source off-the-shelf parts, and benchmarks like CAD Arena and LuxoBench show steady gains. But the author argues the digital-to-physical interface is lossy: real-world data is sparse, expensive, slow, and often qualitative, and manufacturing involves tolerances, vendors, and supply chains that resist one-shot design. Superhuman hardware engineers are coming, but design is only the first step.
It is exceptionally hard to know precisely what is going on in the real, physical world.
- PowerElectronix
I have to disagree here. While it's been proven that a lot of things can be done by just searching a very big solution space very fast (either by brute compute or by a sophisticated algo or both), hardware solution spaces are not that easily searched.
For a lot of applications where signal integrity is not critical, high frequency switching is not required and power density is moderate, yeah. Anyone can do that, even an AI. But you don't even need to make a pcb for those cases, just throw the components in a protoboard and fire away.
When you start adding variables to the search space (emi interference, matching routing impedances, heat management, mechanical integrity, etc) the search space grows so big that any non-expert will become lost in it.
Will future cheap compute power be able to overcome this? I'm not betting on it.
- xnorswap
It struck me as anachronistic that the 1915 worlds fair would demonstrate the steam locomotive, a technology that had been around for decades.
Reality turns out to be more interesting, it was an exhibit of Southern Pacific's first steam locomotive, the CP Huntington, built in 1863.
So while it's true to say that the 1915 worlds' fair exhibited Southern Pacific's first steam locomotive, it's also very misleading to suggest it was new technology of the time.
- num42
Hardware is Hard! - Popular quote
There are so many processes involved in making a high-precision bolt that goes into an F1 racing car. Well, hardware is always limited by laws of physics, it's hard to accelerate. Maybe in the future, AI will do this too, through robotics. I am still waiting for the robotics ChatGPT moment.
Life of Bolt(2016):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iptAkpqjtMQ
Dan Gelbart recently appeared on a podcast where he shared valuable insights into precision engineering. It was really great!
Title: Solving Impossible Problems for Fun and Profit - Dan Gelbart
- t9ejrmdkdldk
> lit the drone on fire in July, re-assembled and crashed it into my neighbor’s roof in August,
Drones should be handled the same way as weapons! Strict licenses and mandatory insurance!