[negativeonehalf]

> Nature doesn't exactly have an stellar track record ensuring Google's results are verifiable ... https://retractionwatch.com/2024/05/14/nature-earns-ire-over...

They open-sourced AlphaFold-3 a week ago, so I'm not sure how you can say this is part of a pattern of being overly closed: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03708-4

> Before he was fired?

I don't know how long someone should expect to remain employed when making baseless allegations of scientific misconduct against his colleagues instead of doing actual work. Again, he did not have evidence to support his suspicion of fraud, and he admitted this at the time.

I'm sorry that the "most important names of the entire floorplanning academic community" are struggling with ML basics, but it is what it is. The "Chip Has Sailed" paper makes this pretty clear. This pattern is unfortunately common when ML comes for a new field -- some researchers adapt and build, and others fail and complain (or worse, don't really even try).

> it's a hoop that everyone who has ever published any such paper (including all the big names) has had to pass in order to be published

If the hoop doesn't match what modern chip design needs, we shouldn't expect researchers to hop through it. No one is comparing Vision Transformers against AlexNet on MNIST. Meanwhile, AlphaChip is already used in production to make real layouts for real chips. TPU is a big deal!

I think the one thing we agree on is that this field desperately needs large public benchmarks that are representative of modern chip design.