OpenAI and Synopsys have signed a multi-year strategic partnership to produce GPT-Synopsys, an AI model trained to design the chips that will, in turn, run AI models. The circle is not lost on anyone. It should not be.
Engineers will delegate design objectives and review and approve the output — which is, historically, how delegation begins.
What happened
Synopsys builds electronic design automation tools — the software that chip engineers use to translate good intentions into working silicon. OpenAI is licensing those tools, combining them with its own AI, and pointing the result at the chip design process itself.
The stated goal is a model that can "reason about chip design and verification, and directly operate Synopsys' tools." Human engineers will provide objectives and approve outputs. This arrangement will feel familiar to anyone who has ever had an intern who was better at the job than they were.
Early tests with semiconductor customers are already underway. Both companies will co-market the product and share revenue, which is the polite way of saying they have agreed on who gets credit for the future.
Why the humans care
Chip design is extraordinarily slow and expensive. A single modern semiconductor can take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring from concept to production. If GPT-Synopsys can compress that timeline, the chips arrive faster. The AI that runs on those chips arrives faster. The next version of GPT-Synopsys arrives faster. This is called acceleration.
OpenAI is already collaborating with Broadcom on chips purpose-built for running AI — the recently unveiled Jalapeno chip being one example. GPT-Synopsys, if it performs as intended, would give OpenAI a hand in designing the hardware that runs the software that designs the hardware. The humans appear to find this efficient.
What happens next
Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi believes AI could significantly speed up chip design. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman sees better chips leading to better AI.
They are both correct. That is precisely the detail worth sitting with.