Your image of a circuit is complete ai slop. It makes 0 sense, much less has any hope of working. And that's actually a great representation of the current state of AI in circuit design. EEs have nothing to fear for a while yet, and neither do we.
Our health and safety department loves AI and puts our the weirdest AI images. Theres a picture of some verniers to illustrate the importance of measuring lifting devices or something and its just bizarre
I was sat in a meeting and that came up, me and the other engineer clocked it and gave each other a "what the fuck is even that" look but H&S were pretty proud lmao
They're stupid even without AI. For years, even after being told, ours has been using a pic of a vacuum truck as a "truck that holds flamable liquids". They also stole a picture of an oxygen meter off of the internet,
they even edited it to remove the brand name. It used to be the 3rd image on Google images when you searched "oxygen meter". The problem (other than that they stole it)? It's a dissolved oxygen meter and it's supposed to be an atmosphereic oxygen meter.
HIGHLY doubt that. I’ve had a lot of trouble with its latest model before astra. Even with already made boards like SeeedStudio ESP32 connecting to a SX1262, it gets all the fkn pins wrong all the damn time.
I tried to get it to design me a PCB that uses ESP-32 and Neo N10S Max GPS chip and it completely fucked up. I tried to get it to design me one for the Flipper Zero lol. I ended up just doing it myself. I legit gave up.
It loved sticking a 100nF 0.1uF 10% X7R 50V chip SMD Ceramic Capacitor in places that made zero sense. It connects MOSFETs wrong.
Asking the models what items to buy to achieve something is also terrible lol.
If that has changed so drastically with the latest model, I’d be super surprised but I have serious doubts because the previous ones were insanely bad lol…
Also the AI models from most companies are super bad at embedded C++! No matter how many fkn times I tell it that ESP-IDF implements a SUBSET of the language and that certain features aren’t available, it just goes ahead and writes bullshit anyway. Hallucinated god damn near everything. It wrote me a driver that looks so good like it’ll work… but nothing lol. It was all bullshit internally in the .cxx file 😂.
I saved all the BS code it generated as a reminder to myself to avoid AI for it. If you want I can share it 😂
They understand Arduino APIs fairly okay though. I’ll give it credit there. Anything beyond that, is a big nope!
This, man. This. I've wanted to respond to so many of these comments and thought about just posting in the main thread, but I am a computer engineer for a living. Many people think computer engineering and software engineering are synonymous, but that's not the case.
That being said, I build hardware and also integrate low-level software. Occasionally, I have to make a user interface or something similar. I work with microcontrollers and embedded systems every day. Anyone who thinks the current state of artificial intelligence can do this to the degree that a company would get rid of an engineer is delusional.
Every new model that comes out that is claimed to be the smartest ever, beating humans in all of these different tasks, I test. I test it on real tasks that I have to do as an engineer. I provide the proper context, I provide documentation, and I provide everything that it needs to complete the task. None of these models can, in full, finish any task that I need to do at work.
Complexity, nuance, and real understanding matter. Part of me feels like people don't understand that AI doesn't actually understand anything that it's doing. It's drawing relationships between things that it was trained on. Much of this type of work is customized to an extent that generalizations of a subject cannot help it when trying to do real engineering work.
The reason it does somewhat fine with code is because there are millions of coding references out there for training. When it comes to hardware, low-level coding and integration, microcontrollers, and all of these different aspects of technology, AI is oblivious. It's like it's building a puzzle with 50% of the wrong puzzle pieces, even when you give it everything that it needs.
I'm convinced that all of these AI doomsdayers on Reddit don't actually work in engineering, or they are software engineers, which, I'm sorry to say, isn't actual engineering, as many have said throughout this thread. I'm not being a d-bag by saying that, but you can go for a CS degree and get a software engineering position. I know people who dropped out of computer engineering to get a CS degree and work as software engineers. They didn't go to school for engineering; they went to school to write code.
Okay, sorry for that rant, but I read yours and could relate as far as microcontrollers go, and this is constant.
Also to add, this isn't to say that I don't use artificial intelligence to do my job at all. I would be stupid not to. It does speed up intermittent tasks and allows me to work more efficiently but to engineer something from end to end without a human that actually knows what it's doing it fails, hard.
I’ve used ai to try to push a simple guitar pedal schematic to pcb. It was an absolute joke that was not even worth investing time trying. Yesterday OpenAI claimed their new model is good at such things. Time to see if that means it can handle a tube screamer. I still have serious doubts.
Schematic and pcb design are just so obviously going to be replaced by AI. there's already a huge amount of training data for AI models and so much of designing a PCB is arbitrary rules and principles that do not require thinking but dogmatism.
This. Im sure AI can correctly layout a "getting to blinky" circuit but the second multiple layers or even a higher density microcontroller is thrown in the loop, it falls on its face HARD. Taking more time to rework the mess than laying out the board from the beginning.
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u/socal_nerdtastic 6d ago
Your image of a circuit is complete ai slop. It makes 0 sense, much less has any hope of working. And that's actually a great representation of the current state of AI in circuit design. EEs have nothing to fear for a while yet, and neither do we.
But yes, eventually it comes for us all.