What happened
Chip floorplanning had been a weeks-to-months human task. Mirhoseini, Goldie, and colleagues trained a graph-based RL agent that placed macros in hours and reported wirelength, congestion, and timing competitive with or better than human experts. The Nature paper stated the method had already been used to design the next generation of Google TPUs. DeepMind’s later AlphaChip writeup says those layouts appear in TPU generations through Trillium and in other Alphabet chips such as Axion. Igor Markov and others argued the published comparisons were not reproduced as described. This entry credits a specialized RL system used in physical chip design, not an LLM. Status is disputed: production use is attested by Google; the ‘superhuman vs human experts’ claim remains contested.