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America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

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Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#221

Post by subscribed »

janalsncm wrote: post #194
mikewarot wrote: post #133

Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the j…

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now. By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge , transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#222

Post by mkl »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #193
rhubarbtree wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that the case? If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much? We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence. OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it may not even be possible without inventing and mass-manufacturing better hardware). Another company achieving a slightly different form of AGI within a few years will probably be at least competitive, and if they have more resources or a better design they could overtake.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#223

Post by ahoka »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #193
rhubarbtree wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that the case? If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much? We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence. OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

These companies already have access to the best meat-brains in the world and what tasks do they work on? Advertisement mostly?

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#224

Post by 2b3a51 »

alsetmusic wrote: post #189
EdwardDiego wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu? Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.

Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.

A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#225

Post by lm28469 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

It really shows how desperate some people are, sacrificing everything, present and future, in the quest of a digital god that might not even exist.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#226

Post by theevilsharpie »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI.

If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, at best, functionally useless.

AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be --- science fiction.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#227

Post by lm28469 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #195
alsetmusic wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless your family owned the company).

Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI. There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of…

> There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years

So agi before autonomous tesla? "Just two more years guys I promise", how can people keep falling for these lol

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#228

Post by nebula8804 »

protocolture wrote: post #156
coliveira wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.

Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items. Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with…

There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#229

Post by lm28469 »

bhewes wrote: post #61

We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do see output increases.

Weird that it doesn't translate to any visible growth, everyone became a 10x employee, but if you exclude Ai companies themselves the GDP barely moved in 3 years.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#230

Post by lm28469 »

gretch wrote: post #57
madhacker wrote: post #25

Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.

I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years. Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war. It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.

"we're all pursuing Ai to prepare ww3" isn't the argument you think it is
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