If he's right they've got a problem because they're actively using the research in their chip designs. Personally, I think if this technique really didn't work they probably would've figured that out when taking it to production.
From a quick scan of the paper, it seems the issue is not that the RL technique doesn't work (the chips do function) but that the claim that RL is just a really bad and inefficient way to do it. Key paragraph:
"We find that RePlAce [non AI] produces 26% better wirelength than RL [reinforcement learning] whilst using 5 orders of magnitude less computation"
If that's true then you can see why he criticized the Nature paper. It's not a small difference in performance. The classical techniques are just crushing the AI in this paper.
Well they said they implemented it in their “pipeline”, which could mean anything from they are using it lots to almost not using it at all. How often have we deployed features in our own software that are barely touched in practice?
Maybe I’m being too cynical about press releases though!
