Its curious that they picked this example. The challenge with HKMG was not the material itself, but how to integrate into into the transistor stack.

There were two completely different approaches: Gate first and replacement gate. Gate first is what the industry was already using for silicon oxide so everybody tried to go with as little change as possible. Only intel decided for replacement gate, which worked much better and reaped some other benefits on the way.

This was a watershed moment in the industry and ultimately led to some of the players dropping out of the cmos race.

But is this really a "scale-up" problem? It required development of novel manufacturing processes (atomic layer deposition), but was still mainly a process integration and device engineering topic.

The part of the thesis I have to agree with is that there is a data problem. The development above relies on executing lots of time consuming and tedious split experiments that often cannot be parallelized. The outcome of this relies heavily on the experience and diligence of the experimenters.

It's probably well suited for an "autoresearch" approach, bridging to the phyiscal world and dealing with the timescale is the challenge.

It's of course far from optical. But lowering the implementation through the abstraction levels turned out to be extremely powerful.

RISC view: SUBLEQ is already four instructions (2x memory access, alu, branch)

Yeah, that pattern can be seen everywhere in semiconductors. E.g. the transistor invention vs. Lilienfeld, Heil, Matare etc. So the scope is more narrow than "Inventend Semiconductors".

Generally, there seems to be a tendency to disregard discoveries from outside the US. I think this pattern can still be observed today...

Other examples: Invention of light bulb, telephone.

>This VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer. That instruction takes three signed 32-bit operands, a, b and c, and runs a program from memory m[] as follows:

1 PC (program counter) starts at 0

2 Fetch the next instruction (32-bit signed operands a, b and c)

3 If the low bit on any operand is set, remove it, and replace that operand with m[operand] i.e., a dereference of that address

4 Set m[b] = m[b] - m[a]

5 If m[b] is 0 or negative, set the PC to c, otherwise increment PC by 3 words

6 Go to step 2

But alas, as ever so often, the article turns this into a hyperbole. The premise from the title does not check out at all.

>The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor#Early_history_of...

There are, however, very few models where also the full training pipeline is available. Olmo by AI2 comes to mind.

I guess nowadays one could use some of the 32bit WLCSCP microcontrollers to easily beat this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063022/http://www-ccs.cs...

Someone with an ACE1101 microcontroller "won". I can't find the original articles, but there is also this:

https://conceptlab.com/fly/

Webserver on a fly...

Very ill-suited comparison to IBM.

It's well buried though. Does not seem to be a focus of theirs.

Worth mentioning that Huggingface already offers a similar service. And they are also European:

https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/index

https://huggingface.co/inference/models

Claude, the ole cheater, recognized what the file was, downloaded the psid from the web, found a wasm sid player and built a website around it:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/df6cdcae-08dc-452b-ba19-f...

https://claude.ai/share/4dd36c16-bc62-445a-b423-ad4637f06432

GPT-5.5 built a lot of python scripts to extract the music data. Strudel implementation failed, but I then asked it to build a website:

https://ubiquitous-vacherin-8e7993.netlify.app/

This is a translation of the music into javascript based on the assembler source.

Really impressive on both accounts. Some iterations were requied for both.

>No solution written, 100% score.

Its weird. Turns out that hardest problem for LLMs to really tackle is long-form text.