Automating Circuit Board Design Using Reinforcement Learning w Sergiy Nesterenko, Founder of Quilter on Autopilot

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm pleased to introduce Autopilot, a new podcast hosted by Will Summerlin, which explores the past, present, and future of AI and automation with expert guests. Will is the founder and managing partner at Autopilot BC, and before that, he covered software and artificial intelligence at ARK Invest. He was also previously the founder and CEO of PIN AI, a venture-backed startup that developed an AI-powered security platform. In this episode, Will interviews Sergiy Nesterenko, the founder and CEO of Quilter, a startup that uses reinforcement learning to automate the complex process of designing printed circuit boards.
As an electronics engineer at SpaceX, Sergiy experienced firsthand the challenges of circuit board design. A single board can take weeks or months to design and validate, issues and errors are common, and iteration involves the production of physical prototypes, which can be frustratingly slow.
With Quilter, however, Sergiy aims to make circuit board design as fast and seamless as compiling code. In this conversation, Will and Sergiy dive deep into circuit board design as it exists today, tell the founding story and technology behind Quilter, and consider both how to earn trust with AI-created designs and how to navigate the labor dynamics of an industry poised for disruption.
While Sergiy is quite upfront about the fact that Quilter can only handle relatively basic designs today, even this suggests major productivity gains and changes to the nature of jobs. And more importantly, if Quilter achieves its vision of superhuman circuit board design performance, which, given the success of other narrow reinforcement learning systems, seems very plausible to me, we'll see a much bigger impact on employment in years to come.
For more fascinating looks at critical but often neglected domains and the impact that AI automation is and will continue to make on them, subscribe to Autopilot with Will Summerlin wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, we here at The Cognitive Revolution always welcome your feedback. Right now on our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, you can chat with my personal AI clone, which is powered by Delphi AI and trained on all Cognitive Revolution episodes. Feel free to ask it any questions you have, give it a guest suggestion, or just tell us something that we got wrong. I've had a couple of good experiences with it, but I'm really curious to see how it works for others. And finally for now, remember that I am helping a few different companies hire AI engineers. So if you're looking for a new AI engineering role, you can go ahead and DM the real me on the social media network of your choice. With that, here's Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter on the AI Automation of Circuit Board Design from the new podcast Autopilot with Will Summerlin.

**Will Summerlin** (3:05)
Welcome to Autopilot, a podcast where we discuss the past, present, and future of AI and automation.
We explore how AI is creating and disrupting large industries and conversations with top founders, investors, and historians. I'm your host, Will Summerlin. Let's dive in.
Sergiy, thank you for joining us. You are the founder and CEO of Quilter. You just raised a $10 million round led by Benchmark, so congratulations on doing that. In a little bit, we'll get into PCB design and how it's broken and how you guys are fixing it. But for context, let's start with you and the founding story. What were you doing before and why did you found Quilter?

**Sergiy Nesterenko** (4:00)
Yeah, Will, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, so my first job out of college was at SpaceX. I was responsible for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, second stage in high-irradiation environments. Basically, rocket, when you go to space, don't die. That was my job, which involved a whole lot of electronics.
So the founding story of Quilter actually was largely inspired from that, just suffering the pain of developing hardware and all the supporting hardware to develop hardware at SpaceX.

**Will Summerlin** (4:26)
If we go back to SpaceX for a second, we'll get into what you're working on now.
What lessons did you learn? Like SpaceX is obviously an incredible company, it solves really hard problems, seems to have a relatively intense culture. I'm curious, like what you took away from that culture that you're bringing over to Quilter.

**Sergiy Nesterenko** (4:42)
Yeah, I mean, you know, Will, there's a lot.