It's funny we're already at the "actually this isn't very impressive" stage when it was a little over a year ago when we were making fun of LLMs for not being able to add numbers.
IC production takes a vast amount of resources and wealth, and it's a known quantity (after all, we've been doing it for decades), but it's still impressive what modern fabs can achieve.
That does not reflect with testing I just did locally. When the option of writing and running scripts was available, Qwen3.8-flash did indeed prefer to just do a physics related calculation via code. But, with a fresh chat and tool access turned off, it did the work on its own and produced correct results. Each step was rounded similar to how a person working by hand might do things, but matched my own hand calculations perfectly.
I found this post hilarious exactly about this the other day:
First, it’s AI can’t multiply 4-digit numbers.
Then it’s AI can only, by brute force, get silver in the IMO with specialized systems.
Then it’s OK, well, now a general-purpose model can get gold, but it’s still just the IMO, it’s for high schoolers.
Then it’s OK, it can solve a few trivial Erdős problems, but only because nobody seriously tried them before, they were low-hanging fruit.
Then it’s OK, a lot of serious mathematicians tried this one, but the result was still obvious in hindsight, it just combined knowledge from a thought-to-be-unrelated field, if any human knew that, they would solve it.
And then to OK, but there are still Millennium Prize Problems.
Then OK well it's just Navier-Stokes wake me up when its the Riemann Hypothesis.
IC production takes a vast amount of resources and wealth, and it's a known quantity (after all, we've been doing it for decades), but it's still impressive what modern fabs can achieve.