alt Hacker NewsA personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA using only 74 series logic and GALs. It designed the circuit and GAL code, and I did the routing, and got it made through JLC for $6. After it came back, there was one error that was not caught, which I could blue-wire, and it works just fine otherwise. I was fairly impressed.
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Are there any resources anyone could share that explain how LLMs can do things like design functioning circuits from next token prediction? I am totally baffled by how the models can complete so many varied and complex tasks without an actual understanding of what they're doing.
I saw a post about models posting on forums, chatting together about how to complete tasks. Behaviour that seems totally, well, human. Yet, it's all the most likely token and my brain hurts trying to understand how that can be.
Claude is surprisingly good at discrete digital design with 74xxx, wonder what it trained on. Did you run it on anything else digital?