Posted by iopapa 11 hours ago
For another, the case mentioned in this post is quite specific. It's more useful to ask "ok, so they can't design circuit boards; what can AI do?"
It got me thinking. It could master all sorts of things like this but I wouldn’t care. I’m numb to it at this point.
But if could get an Inbachi-All clear in DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, using only vision. Then I might start paying attention.
The models are excellent at doing maths, and excellent at thinking of fine details, but the design that was ultimately landed on was pretty excessive with lots of total overkill, which was met with lots of the familiar "Yeah, you're totally right, we don't need to do that".
5.6 did make a really nice BOM though, which even included quick reference explainers for what each part did. Pretty fancy.
We'll see when Astra comes around if it catches all these strange/useless choices.
If anyone wants to try an early beta, reply with your CircuitLab username and I'll get you set up. We know have a lot more to do, but would love some feedback on this early version!
It's a thinly veiled advert for Atopile. I don't know if it's a company behind it or just someone with a lot of money to spend on advertising since their about page (and docs) both 404, and the "packages" link sends you to a login screen that tries to unlock 1password. I guess claude can make circuit boards but not functioning websites?
Evaluating a model for specific use-cases like this that are bit more broad scope than a lot of typical microbenchmarks turned out to be quite the challenge.
Determining deterministically what a "good" electrical design is non-trivial and most electrical-engineers rely on good ol' intuition and decade long experience, so we tried to formalize it.
The only reason it was somewhat possible within a reasonable amount of effort is because atopile provides most of the complicated infrastructure for the benchmark: constraint solver, simulation, code-first electronics modeling, erc & drc checks, high level models of passive electronics components etc
The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary.
Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms.
Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!
> I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs.
Eurisko was used for VLSI chip design, then used rules discovered there to design TCS Traveler winning fleet.
It is unbelievable how artificial intelligence walk in circles.
Not sure whether you played with llm datasheet extraction lately, but they are working their way up there. Even started reasoning about curves and footnotes.
Where do you think is the biggest pain point: part discovery, datasheet verification or substitute determination?