All the focus around Jalapeño seems centered on performance vis-a-vis Nvidia, but the engineering velocity behind it is truly remarkable. Some highlights from the @hotchipsorg talk: 1. Building custom chips used to require massive armies of engineers and multi-year timelines. OpenAI went from initial RTL code to tapeout in just 9 months using XLS (a Rust-like language for hw from Google) and AI-driven co-design. 2. An AI loop took a raw, barely functional (DeepSeek) kernel running at 0.31%…