The tech giant said in a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday that a chip that would take humans months to design can be dreamed up by its new AI in less than six hours.

The AI has already been used to develop the latest iteration of Google's tensor processing unit chips, which are used to run AI-related tasks, Google said.

"Our method has been used in production to design the next generation of Google TPU," wrote the authors of the paper, led by Google's head of machine learning for systems, Azalia Mirhoseini.

It takes humans months to optimally design these floorplans but Google's deep reinforcement learning system — an algorithm that's trained to take certain actions in order to maximize its chance of earning a reward — can do it with relatively little effort.