[dofm]

Right. There are two possible meanings and shades in-between:

1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)

2) OpenAI designed test/verification models and kernels that could be run on the simulated hardware to test its performance

As you and others have said, it's hard to trust when they are happy to write something that could easily only mean the latter but sounds like the former.

[lovasoa]

3) The engineers working on the chip used ChatGPT from time to time.

[fl4regun]

at the hardware company I work at, people are now using claude code and developing skills for it to do basic stuff like triage or do initial debug on failing tests, search for potential causes in RTL, generate skeleton documentation for designs etc

[dofm]

But isn't this rather the ordinary product of an LLM, now?

Is it worth the claim that they are making in a press release?

[Catloafdev]

I'd be shocked if it was anything more than this.

[changoplatanero]

Browsing openai's job postings in the past few months is enough to contirm that it's more than this. They are for sure making serious efforts at building ai for chip design.

[xnx]

Impossible to know. Could be fake/aspirational roles to impress investors with their grand vision.

[NitpickLawyer]

Jesus. This is tinfoil hat territory now. Why would they fake something like that? ANY company in this field would try to become free from nvda. Goog has done it already, amazon has their own thing, so it can be done. Not saying they'll 0shot this vertical, but ffs, they don't need to fake anything. They are making an effort, and it would be insane to think they aren't. Might work, might not work, but to even think that the effort is fake is going too far.

[luqtas]

https://antoniocortes.com/en/2026/03/10/ghost-jobs-the-econo...

[signatoremo]

Do you have inside knowledge?

[reducesuffering]

From time to time? Lol you must realize, frontier lab eng are using Codex/Claude-Code 99% in loops, on models the public doesn't have access to. Why? Because it works. Just a matter of time before humans are out of the loop and what comes next is a black hole

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed"

[wongarsu]

Or OpenAI accelerated the design and optimization process by summarizing emails exchanged during the design and optimization process, or made it possible to ask an AI questions about meeting notes

[Aurornis]

> 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)

Chip design languages (HDLs like Verilog or VHDL) are well understood by LLMs. They don’t need specialty tools to use GPT-5.5 or other LLMs with them.

You could even try it yourself with open source chip design tooling if you wanted to see it.

[dofm]

Yes, obviously. But do we think LLMs without access to proprietary information do a better job with them than Broadcom's human experts or existing proprietary tools at this level of operations?

It is still a bold claim and it still needs evidence.

We would obviously get a bit more of the evidence if it were to be more useful for the upcoming IPO than this rather open-ended, reinterpretable phrasing.

[dpe82]

I don't understand why you're getting downvoted.

I've used GPT-5.5 and Opus both for FPGA design with good results. We built a lot of tooling around it to help the models, but even without that they're definitely capable of designing digital logic.

[dmitrygr]

My guess: it is that those who KNOW the subject realize that LLMs suck at it, and those who do not, do not realize it, since their output is plausible, and sometimes even works.

This actually plays out across every field and is well documented. An expert can recognize the hallucinations and bullshit coming out of LLMs, while non-experts see plausible output and do not know enough to know it is BS.

[wmf]

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3785362

https://developer.nvidia.com/culitho

https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/chip-design/analog-layout-syn...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06415

[etempleton]

I feel like they would be very specific if it was no.1.

[oceanplexian]

> OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)

Why is that a bold and unlikely claim?

Are you saying that AI, which has been proven to cure diseases, solve our hardest math problems, write complex computer code and generate entire generated worlds and HD video from a simple prompt would somehow be like, my bad, I guess I can't design chips?

[smokel]

> solve our hardest math problems

We're not quite there yet :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...

[dofm]

> Why is that a bold and unlikely claim?

Because they could have offered even slightly more evidence.

[cess11]

Because then they'd likely have stfu and outperformed Intel, Nvidia and AMD, or at least one of them.

They're burning more cash than pretty much anyone else and doesn't have anything public that looks like a matching revenue stream so they probably need one very badly.

[scrollop]

Perhaps they used gpt 5.5 mini to draft emails. Create a coffee schedule.