alt Hacker NewsChips design is expensive. Partly because of engineering costs, partly because of manufacturing costs.
If costs go down enough,because of LLM's and possible manufacturing innovations, more chips will be designed, so maybe this will partially offset job loses.
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The wish granting machine won't need the engineers for that. You'll just end up paying for the devices.
When TSMC capacity is already sold out for a couple of years, and demand just for plain RAM is through the roof, where will these "more chips" be actually fabbed?
> more chips will be designed, so maybe this will partially offset job loses.
This is HN mentality. But it is not how it always works. The first thought isn't we can make more money tomorrow by building more faster. It is we can make more money today by laying off all the people that we don't need now. Short-termism is the rule.
For each Design Engineer, there are 3 Design Validation Engineers because going to fabrication is very expensive and it is unlike software where you can just do a git push and wait for the CI/CD pipeline to deploy code within minutes at no additional costs.
So let's see.