Yeah, no, that is not what the article says. AlphaChip is better at component/module placement in terms of connection length between them.

Not to say that that isn’t cool. But it is not recursive. That would imply that the chip with shorter connection length improves the models performance significantly, which they do not claim at all. Because it would quickly reach diminishing returns.

There is a thousand things that go into making chips. Many will benefit from the automatic optimization of such algorithms. But this doesn’t suddenly give you a new manufacturing node or anything comparable out of thin air. Just a marginal improvement on existing design.