Hi everyone, Karim the Co-founder & CEO of InstaDeep here, first thank you for the interest and comments we did not expect we would appear in HN so quickly :) We’ve reviewed carefully the different points made, comments below:

“This is an unsolved problem… Yes, this is the point. It's NP-Hard”: "We harness the power of advanced AI and deliver results in less than 24 hours...", which is a red flag” InstaDeep has built credibility in AI circles by innovating in Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) specifically on how to find good solutions to NP-Hard problems with AI. For example, you can check our R2 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01672) about AI for combinatorial optimization which was accepted at the NeurIPS 2018 in the Deep RL workshop. More recently we’ve just published joint AI-research in RL with Google DeepMind that earned a top 2% global ranking at NeurIPS 2019 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12941). We also have specific domain expertise in Hardware: some of our team members have worked for more than 15 years in this field in companies such as STM, NXP, Dialog, etc. We believe it’s an exciting time to be working on PCB Routing, an NP-Hard problem.

“ I would bet they have a human in the loop”: No our system is fully automated (which is why it’s a first) so bear with us as we are in beta :) Automation is possible because we use RL, which is very useful for decision-making problems like PCB Routing. At InstaDeep, we deploy RL systems in the real world and work closely with hardware partners such as Nvidia (we’ve recently been upgraded to preferred partner) and Intel (we’re part of the AI Builder Program). In our opinion, having no-human in the loop is critical to accelerate PCB development cycles, and that’s a key feature of DeepPCB.

“Shitty auto routers have existed for 25 years, at least.”: that’s the whole point, autorouters don’t get the job done properly, which is why many boards are still done manually. It makes sense that AI could improve things here.

“the hardest part of PCB routing is Placement”: totally agree here, and our goal once DeepPCB routing is out of beta, is to tackle placement. Routing is an important first step, but we don’t plan to stop there. In our livestream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea5i-l8YKQo) a few days ago we clearly mentioned that Placement is our key goal for next year.

“I exhausted the 3 project limit trying to see how it would route”: we hear you and have decided to increase the limit to 4 credits per week. We’ve also regenerated the credits for everyone already registered! We will periodically review credits based on demand to accommodate as many users as possible. If you would like more credits please contact us!

On a final note, keep in mind we’re in early beta and our goal is to hear from you to iterate and improve the product better. Things might break from time to time and we’ll certainly make mistakes but what matters to us is to keep working hard and make progress on this exciting problem. We believe it’s the combination of Hardware domain expertise and advanced AI know-how that yields strong results. If you agree, don’t hesitate to reach out at support@deeppcb.ai we’d love to hear from you!