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The "Design Conductor" paper is bunk | ~/mlyoung

mlyoung.cool · 3,204 words · saved by 1 readers

A paper about an 'agent' 'autonomously' building a 1.5 GHz 'Linux-capable' CPU turns out to be full of misinformation and unfair comparisons. I.e., it's bunk. I break down why.

The "Design Conductor" paper is bunk | ~/mlyoung The "Design Conductor" paper is bunk 02 Apr, 2026 • 3169 words Table of Contents Introduction Recently, a paper (PDF) was published on arXiv entitled "Design Conductor: An agent autonomously builds a 1.5 GHz Linux-capable RISC-V CPU" . This paper describes the authors, from a startup called "Verkor", using an AI "agent" they call "Design Conductor" to design a RISC-V chip called VerCore . This has been breathlessly covered in the media, most notably by Adafruit ; but by others (1) , (2) as well. This paper, however, has an enormous number o

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