To be fair, some of these criticisms are a few years old. Which normally would be fair game, but the progress in AI has been breakneck. Criticism of other AI tech from 2021 or 2022 are pretty dated today.
Dated or not, if half of the criticisms are right, the original paper may need to be retracted. No progress on RL for chip design was published by Google since 2022, as far as I can tell. So, it looks like most if not all criticisms remain valid.
> No progress on RL for chip design was published by Google since 2022, as far as I can tell.
This makes sense given that both authors of the paper left Google in 2022. And one no longer seems to work in the chip design space, plausibly because of the bullying by entrenched folks.
Then again, since rejoining Google the other author has produced around one patent per month in chip design with RL in 2023 and 2024, so perhaps they feel there is a marketable tool here that they don't want to share.