Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-06-28 · 1h 3m
Thomas Ahle wants Normal Computing to be the Lovable for chip design: type your intent, and a swarm of agents carries it from design through optimisation, formalisation and verification to tape-out. To get there, his team at wrote their own open-source Verilog simulator, 580,000 lines in 43 days, because commercial EDA verifiers run about $10,000 per core and there are no decent open-source compilers to build on. That sets up the question Tim keeps pressing: if an agent can produce a chip design, a proof, or a working program, how do you actually know it is correct? Passing 70% of tests is not the same as being right, and a single fabricated bug can cost a company a fortune. They dig into ProgramBench (rebuild a program from its tests, roughly 0% success), the difference between structure and competence, and the "understanding debt" you take on when nobody reads the code.
The Benchmark With No Instructions - ARC-AGI-3 (winning team!)85 / 100He won a Nobel here for AlphaFold. Then he left. - John JumperWhen AI Decides You're a Threat - Brad CarsonIntelligence is collective, not artificial - Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria) The AI Models Smart Enough to Know They're Cheating - Beth Barnes & David Rein [METR]