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We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians

407 points · 504 comments · srcreigh

  1. Animats · · focus · HN ↗
    "We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians."

    What the article really says is that we're going to need much smarter mathematicians. That is not possible for puny meat-brain humans. Humans are close to their ceiling. AIs are just getting started.

    In practice, we're probably going to hit that limit first in IC design. I once went to a talk by the Intel engineering manager who headed the Pentium Pro effort. That was the first superscalar x86 CPU, and it took about 5,000 engineers at peak to design it. Getting that many people coordinated on one thing was a real achievement. Then Intel stayed with minor tweaks on that design for years.

    We're soon going to be seeing designs of even greater complexity cranked out by AIs. No human will understand them at the gate level. Reading AI-written programming language code is bad enough. Reading AI-written Verilog may be beyond human comprehension, except in small sections.

    1. kens · · focus · HN ↗
      5000 engineers for the Pentium Pro?? Bob Colwell, chief architect of the Pentium Pro, says 450+ people with over 400 design and validation engineers. Source: "The Pentium Chronicles", pages xvi and 2.
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