DeepMind made huge breakthroughs, agreed. AlphaGo beat a sitting go champion, which was very cool. AlphaFold solved a large number of proteins with verified results. Are we clear on this? Hope you are taking back your ad hominem.

The team that did RL for chips work was at GoogleBrain, and you already pointed out that Google had bad demos. The fact that this team was absorbed into DeepMind does not magically rub the successes of DeepMind onto them.

The RL for chips results were nothing like AlphaGo. Imagine if AlphaGo claimed to beat unknown go players, you would laugh. But the Nature paper on RL for chips claims to outperform unknown chip engineers. Also, imagine if AlphaFold claimed to fold only proprietary proteins. The Nature paper on RL for chips reports results on a small set of proprietary chip blocks (they released one design, and the results are not great on that one). That's where imaginary results come up. One of these things is not like the others.