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.
I'd say that balancing those aspects are exactly what an AI excels at. And an AI can iterate in a way a human wont. Completely redesign something because an edge-case could be slightly better.
AI isn't brute-forcing, or it would have been completely unusable for code.
We can probably find people saying the search space for Go is too large and that we'll never be able to do protein folding and if we can we'll never manage protein interactions and then well never manage to simulate a whole cell (tbc). I just think at some point these machines become smarter than us, if it's 2 years or 20 years the self improvement part will happen on both the hardware and software side. Judgement day is inevitable.
> 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.
Have you tried Astra?
I'm designing an analog ASIC. It will suggest e.g. transistor matching. You can also give it hints for layout.
You still need to validate with SPICE simulation (and obviously silicon).
I'm also looking into non-LLM scripts that use brute force aided by heuristics (e.g. lookup tables) to efficiently search the solution space.
Also did you not see the quoted post at the end, they are already training ai on running material science labs so we are quickly moving away from the non-expert.
All this emi stuff is easily caught in a few rules that you use over and over again. Exactly the sort of thing an LLM could easily do.
Also, Claude can already write a multiphysics simulator for you. Doing EM analyses on the fly during design is something that will make LLMs much better designers than humans.
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.
~85 years prior to the 1915 fair, Stephenson's Planet 2-2-0 steam loco was operating commercially between Manchester and Liverpool (5 built in 1830). The planet was a version 2 of his earlier Rocket already operating between the cities since 1829/30 - utilizing a very design with the boiler between the wheels layout that almost all steam locomotives eventually adopted.
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.
Yet another "what might be" being conflated with "what is".
"Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part" but then says "Superhuman hardware engineers are coming soon". The first example is a tweet "Vibe hardware is here" that shows a blender animation of a hardware, that looks correct, but hasn't been built or confirmed in any way: https://x.com/eminimnim/status/2098072497182666987?s=20 - The article freely admits it can't yet do the design side. So - in theory the actual hardware design is the easy part, it's not even possible of doing more than a convincing (but very good and actually impressive on it's own!) 3d model.
I'd actually be interested in something that shows how they're trying to get LLMs to design hardware. I'm not interested in investor propaganda that tries to imply things are far further along than they actually are.
I have used local LLMs (Qwen27B) to generate SCAD versions of components. I got there eventually - it took a bit of cajoling, but have printed that component and confirmed that it fit the parts and the output was properly parameterized in a way that Solidworks wasn't.
Why do people always demand strict licenses and mandatory insurance for everything? Scooters, bicycles, small drones. What's next? Need a license for the paper airplane you made because it might poke out someone's eye? Human bodies are big and heavy - they can do a lot of damage if "used improperly" - should we require a license and mandatory insurance to go outside into public spaces too?
A license requirement for a car makes sense - you're dealing with forces well beyond the norm for what a human body has. Small drones though? I just don't see it.
>Why do people always demand strict licenses and mandatory insurance for everything
Because assholes ruin everything for everyone at scale.
> Scooters
Remember when scooters were rare, then some VC's dropped hundreds of thousands of them in major cities so drunk people could plow into the side of your car at 20MPH?
Drones themselves are one of the more wildly dangerous technologies we've really taken off with in the last few decades.
We don't make rules for the good people of the world. We make rules because there's always a part of the population that's willing to take a big'ole shit in your glass of milk and sell it to you as pure milk.
This article is a bit of a confusing mess, mostly stemming from confusion between two vastly different technologies that unfortunately share the same name. Shaheds and counter personnel quads deployed in Ukraine are vastly different technologies. Shaheds, for a lack of a better word, are essentially cheap cruise missiles which are effective because countering them currently usually requires an overly capable and much more expensive counter air missile. Doctrinally except for asymmetry of their cost, they are used much the same a cruise missile would be.
As for antipersonnel quads, Ukraine currently uses 7-8 inch ones. They are not small, quite loud and not exceptionally maneuverable. They are also extremely fragile and can be shot down by hitting just about any part of the quad. Also the thing about being difficult to detect using radars is just not true. They have a fairly large radar signature relative to their size which is also fairly unique because the spinning propellers cause Doppler shift on the rotating props. Small autocannons are already being developed for this role and in the urban environments similar systems using nets are being considered. There are also some prototypes of special rifles or rifle attachments for counter drone use being tested in Ukraine for infantry use.
The two most realistic dangers come from concealing them in shipping containers and then deploying them deep behind enemy lines (I am fairly sure this is already illegal in most jurisdictions) and targeted assassinations, where defending against drone threat is not that different than defending against other assassinations threats (concealed bombs, gunmen, snipers etc.).
I've been a bit surprised this hasn't been happening already. I don't know if the eventual trigger is going to be ICE murders or what, but with as accessible as the tech is, as much unrest as currently exists, and no shortage of people willing to inflict lethal violence via other mechanisms, I would've thought we'd have had at least a little drone violence by now.
People are better than we give ourselves credit for. I remember working at Disneyland during 9/11, the FBI told us we were considered the 4th most likely target in the United States, and mandatory bag checks at the gates made the lines longer and slower than they'd ever been, so enormous crowds, thousands of people, were gathered and effectively trapped between Harbor Blvd and the actual gates. I couldn't help but think how easy it would be for a few guys or even just one to gun down hundreds with a couple of uzis or throw a few pipe bombs into the crowd. Nobody ever did. That Las Vegas concert shooting was the closest anyone has ever come. There are probably many vulnerabilities like that. Poison the water supply to a hospital. Close off a mine on purpose. My girlfriend's brother back in 2004 managed to drive his speedboat with me in it through the LA harbor, right alongside container ships, and succeeded in evading the Coast Guard. It was just a joyride to him, but someone more malicious could probably sink a container ship or even an oil tanker.
These things almost never happen because people just aren't that evil, at least most of the time. When it happens, it's an extraordinary event.
I hate it and I oppose it from outside of logical parts of my brain, but I also just know that quad drones are functionally just less-powerful missile guidance package without the rocket motor. So I can't say this is an unsound argument.
Maybe bureaucrats are fed up of regulating technology as primitive as basic 1960s quality guided missiles. Or whatever. But drones not considered straight up missiles without the bomb part is a bit of a mystery.
Its not easy. Its easy for a certain amount of people, in some situation.
And just because its not easy doesn't mean there needs to be no law. No law means no conviction. There is no 'common sense law' which allows the state to put you in prision because its obvious that using some weapon in an unsave way is illegal.
And yes sometimes society adds protection to normal people so that they don't do stupd things. Plenty of 'smart' people allow others to get killed due to neglect, stupidity etc.
Btw. i'm pretty sure that having easy and quick access to a weapon is also a danger in itself. Sometimes you just need a little bit time of cooling down or talking to someone.
Guns don't scale like drones. No matter how many guns you own, you can only shoot two at a time, and only one if you care about aim.
Building an autonomous drone swarm capable of nuclear-weapon-tier kill count is far easier than building a nuclear weapon. We already know how dangerous military drones are, and those are still mostly bottlenecked by relying on human-powered target identification. Building drones to indiscriminately kill unarmored civilians is an easier task.
> No matter how many guns you own, you can only shoot two at a time, and only one if you care about aim.
This is just as true for guns as drones. Both need fast reactions and fine control. A human cannot control a swarm of drones any better than they can control a swarm of guns, but you can add autonomy (sensors, actuators, compute) to either to get some of those capabilities back.
Conventional munitions will always be more economical. It's hard to beat a few grams of steel in price per kill. Drones are only relatively cheap when compared to rifles, but they're actually replacing bullets/bombs. Great for high value targets, less great for indiscriminate killing.
But the tooling required for guns and rifling in particular is pretty hard to come by, whereas the tooling required to assemble a DIY drone is basically indistinguishable from R/C hobby equipment. You can (try) to regulate where/who/how/when can fly a drone, but regulating drone building seems almost impossible to me.
You can setup a machine gun on a Remote Weapon Station and control it via the internet. You could have agents as machine gunners. Same with rocket launchers.
We are literally seeing the large scale use of robotic weapons platforms AT SCALE.
Machine guns create a storm of ballistic objects, and have been doing so for over 100 years. Large scale murder isn't new. We just have systems that have cameras that make it easy to put the footage online now.
Where though? It's certainly easier in some parts of the worlds than others, and surely something in the environment makes this easier/harder, I wonder if we could identify what exactly?
You just don't know because you have no interest, if you had an interest you would know. Druggies know where to get drugs and preppers/criminals/cops know how to make/buy a gun everywhere on earth. Tech people, by this line of thought, should never have a censored internet, but you would be surprised.
Guns are 500+ year old technology at this point, manufacture is possible anywhere, as the industrious artisans of Yemen and Northwest Pakistan have shown.
You make the action and the barrel in PLA or ABS I suppose? Sounds reliable :)
> but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.
Again, those are bigger in some places in the world, and almost non-existing in most parts of the world, even though it's possible to obtain in the right circles.
If we stop assuming the US's "everyone should have a gun at home" mentality is how it goes everywhere, it's still not "easy to get illegal guns" in most parts of the world.
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.
AI isn't brute-forcing, or it would have been completely unusable for code.
Have you tried Astra?
I'm designing an analog ASIC. It will suggest e.g. transistor matching. You can also give it hints for layout.
You still need to validate with SPICE simulation (and obviously silicon).
I'm also looking into non-LLM scripts that use brute force aided by heuristics (e.g. lookup tables) to efficiently search the solution space.
Btw. the expert had to learn this, its probably available in written form one way or the other on the internet and LLMs have read that too.
You should bet on it.
Famous last words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson
Also did you not see the quoted post at the end, they are already training ai on running material science labs so we are quickly moving away from the non-expert.
Also, Claude can already write a multiphysics simulator for you. Doing EM analyses on the fly during design is something that will make LLMs much better designers than humans.
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.
I would say there is between me and other people a gap of 1-4 years. But we have news, the internet, video and audio.
So what might be 1-4 yeard today, it might have just been 10-50 years at 1915.
A new technology for the avg person
The locomotive being exhibited in 1915 was a historic exhibition, exhibiting their first locomotive, which itself was actually from 1863.
It was a history piece. It was not demonstrating new technology!
It would be like saying that the first shuttle orbiter, Enterprise, was first exhibited in New York in 2012, inspiring crowds.
It's a pedantically true statement ( it was moved to NY in 2012 ), but it doesn't actually tell you about the state of technology in 2012.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTgrWmOk4q8
"Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part" but then says "Superhuman hardware engineers are coming soon". The first example is a tweet "Vibe hardware is here" that shows a blender animation of a hardware, that looks correct, but hasn't been built or confirmed in any way: https://x.com/eminimnim/status/2098072497182666987?s=20 - The article freely admits it can't yet do the design side. So - in theory the actual hardware design is the easy part, it's not even possible of doing more than a convincing (but very good and actually impressive on it's own!) 3d model.
I'd actually be interested in something that shows how they're trying to get LLMs to design hardware. I'm not interested in investor propaganda that tries to imply things are far further along than they actually are.
Drones should be handled the same way as weapons! Strict licenses and mandatory insurance!
A license requirement for a car makes sense - you're dealing with forces well beyond the norm for what a human body has. Small drones though? I just don't see it.
Because assholes ruin everything for everyone at scale.
> Scooters
Remember when scooters were rare, then some VC's dropped hundreds of thousands of them in major cities so drunk people could plow into the side of your car at 20MPH?
Drones themselves are one of the more wildly dangerous technologies we've really taken off with in the last few decades.
We don't make rules for the good people of the world. We make rules because there's always a part of the population that's willing to take a big'ole shit in your glass of milk and sell it to you as pure milk.
Your 'arguments' of paper planes and human bodies are just strawmanning.
You can't fly a paper airplane a few hundred meters atop easily.
Feel free not to see it, i want to have my air space free and I would also never stand under a drone show.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGoo3NWzMAzsLQceJ/drone-wmds...
As for antipersonnel quads, Ukraine currently uses 7-8 inch ones. They are not small, quite loud and not exceptionally maneuverable. They are also extremely fragile and can be shot down by hitting just about any part of the quad. Also the thing about being difficult to detect using radars is just not true. They have a fairly large radar signature relative to their size which is also fairly unique because the spinning propellers cause Doppler shift on the rotating props. Small autocannons are already being developed for this role and in the urban environments similar systems using nets are being considered. There are also some prototypes of special rifles or rifle attachments for counter drone use being tested in Ukraine for infantry use.
The two most realistic dangers come from concealing them in shipping containers and then deploying them deep behind enemy lines (I am fairly sure this is already illegal in most jurisdictions) and targeted assassinations, where defending against drone threat is not that different than defending against other assassinations threats (concealed bombs, gunmen, snipers etc.).
These things almost never happen because people just aren't that evil, at least most of the time. When it happens, it's an extraordinary event.
And yet tens of thousands of us die in the US one or two at a time due to guns.
Humans are odd little copy machines. For example when a big name suicide occurs there tends to be a pretty sharp rise in copycat suicides.
Things tend to add up not in big events, but the long tail sweeps up huge numbers.
Maybe bureaucrats are fed up of regulating technology as primitive as basic 1960s quality guided missiles. Or whatever. But drones not considered straight up missiles without the bomb part is a bit of a mystery.
You know it's easy to get illegal guns right?
And just because its not easy doesn't mean there needs to be no law. No law means no conviction. There is no 'common sense law' which allows the state to put you in prision because its obvious that using some weapon in an unsave way is illegal.
And yes sometimes society adds protection to normal people so that they don't do stupd things. Plenty of 'smart' people allow others to get killed due to neglect, stupidity etc.
Btw. i'm pretty sure that having easy and quick access to a weapon is also a danger in itself. Sometimes you just need a little bit time of cooling down or talking to someone.
Building an autonomous drone swarm capable of nuclear-weapon-tier kill count is far easier than building a nuclear weapon. We already know how dangerous military drones are, and those are still mostly bottlenecked by relying on human-powered target identification. Building drones to indiscriminately kill unarmored civilians is an easier task.
This is just as true for guns as drones. Both need fast reactions and fine control. A human cannot control a swarm of drones any better than they can control a swarm of guns, but you can add autonomy (sensors, actuators, compute) to either to get some of those capabilities back.
Conventional munitions will always be more economical. It's hard to beat a few grams of steel in price per kill. Drones are only relatively cheap when compared to rifles, but they're actually replacing bullets/bombs. Great for high value targets, less great for indiscriminate killing.
We are literally seeing the large scale use of robotic weapons platforms AT SCALE.
Machine guns create a storm of ballistic objects, and have been doing so for over 100 years. Large scale murder isn't new. We just have systems that have cameras that make it easy to put the footage online now.
Where though? It's certainly easier in some parts of the worlds than others, and surely something in the environment makes this easier/harder, I wonder if we could identify what exactly?
Guns are 500+ year old technology at this point, manufacture is possible anywhere, as the industrious artisans of Yemen and Northwest Pakistan have shown.
Ammunition is a bit harder, but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.
> but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.
Again, those are bigger in some places in the world, and almost non-existing in most parts of the world, even though it's possible to obtain in the right circles.
If we stop assuming the US's "everyone should have a gun at home" mentality is how it goes everywhere, it's still not "easy to get illegal guns" in most parts of the world.
The pipe is metal. You don't print that part.