A group of Chinese researchers published a paper describing how they used AI to automate the creation of a CPU about as fast as an Intel i486SX (via Tom’s Hardware) in what they called a “foundational step towards building self-evolving machines.” The Intel i486SX was an early-90s entry-level enterprise CPU.

Left: The outputs of booting up the Linux operating system. Right: The performance of generated CPU (i.e., CPU-AI) is compared against commercial CPUs on the Dhrystone benchmark, and CPU-AI performs comparably to the human-designed Intel 80486SX CPU.