Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking
By Jeremy Hsu
2 October 2024 Last updated 4 October 2024
Can AI design a chip that’s more efficient than human-made ones?
Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images
Google DeepMind says its artificial intelligence has helped design chips that are already being used in data centres and even smartphones. But some chip design experts are sceptical of the company’s claims that such AI can plan new chip layouts better than humans can.
The newly named AlphaChip method can design “superhuman chip layouts” in hours, rather than relying on weeks or months of human effort, said Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, researchers at Google DeepMind, in a blog post. This AI approach uses reinforcement learning to figure out the relationships among chip components and gets rewarded based on the final layout quality. But independent researchers say the company has not yet proven such AI can outperform expert human chip designers or commercial software tools – and they want to see AlphaChip’s performance on public benchmarks involving current, state-of-the-art circuit designs.
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“If Google would provide experimental results for these designs, we could have fair comparisons, and I expect that everyone would accept the results,” says Patrick Madden at Binghamton University in New York. “The experiments would take at most a day or two to run, and Google has near-infinite resources – that these results have not been offered speaks volumes to me.”
Google DeepMind’s blog post accompanies an update to Google’s 2021 Nature journal paper about the company’s AI process. Since that time, Google DeepMind says that AlphaChip has helped design three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU) – specialised chips used to train and run generative AI models for services such as Google’s Gemini chatbot.
The company also claims that the AI-assisted chip designs perform better than those designed by human experts and have been improving steadily. The AI achieves this by reducing the total length of wires required to connect chip components – a factor that can lower chip power consumption and potentially improve processing speed. And Google DeepMind says that AlphaChip has created layouts for general-purpose chips used in Google’s data centres, along with helping the company MediaTek develop a chip used in Samsung mobile phones.