> I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative…. A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want.
In college, one of the classes I took was a basic digital circuit design class. How to build a CPU out of logic gates and things of that nature. A large part of the class was about minimizing a circuit using Karnaugh maps. The professor pointed out, however, that no one in industry actually does this anymore since the introduction of ESPRESSO in the 80’s. Before ESPRESSO, any chip designer would have some junior engineers slaving over Karnaugh maps all day to optimize their designs, but these engineers were replaced overnight by an algorithm.
Did this actually reduce the number of EE’s working in chip design? Maybe it did; I wouldn’t know. And obviously, GPT-4 is a much more general system than ESPRESSO. But it struck me as an interesting parallel.
In college, one of the classes I took was a basic digital circuit design class. How to build a CPU out of logic gates and things of that nature. A large part of the class was about minimizing a circuit using Karnaugh maps. The professor pointed out, however, that no one in industry actually does this anymore since the introduction of ESPRESSO in the 80’s. Before ESPRESSO, any chip designer would have some junior engineers slaving over Karnaugh maps all day to optimize their designs, but these engineers were replaced overnight by an algorithm.
Did this actually reduce the number of EE’s working in chip design? Maybe it did; I wouldn’t know. And obviously, GPT-4 is a much more general system than ESPRESSO. But it struck me as an interesting parallel.