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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

#241

Post by leptons »

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.

Hallucinating "AI" is going to take friendly fire to a whole new level.

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

#242

Post by ragebol »

DannyBee wrote: post #203
nvader wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physi…

'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.

If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery because the knowledge is gone.

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

#243

Post by rcxdude »

DannyBee wrote: post #203
nvader wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physi…

It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.

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

#244

Post by thuridas »

Stephen_0xFF wrote: post #123
ryandrake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Someti…

Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2 baby booming economy.

Without post WW2 taxes.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).

The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.

Another big cost is the university.

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

#245

Post by nikanj »

nebula8804 wrote: post #238
shawn_w wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.

Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the writing of these characters and the world now. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2Ey0H7OUE

My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a car project in the garage et cetera

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

#246

Post by 4gotunameagain »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #198
4gotunameagain wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very idea that AGI will arise from LLMs is ridiculous at best. Computer science hubris at its finest.

Why is it ridiculous that an LLM or a system similar to or built off of an LLM could reach AGI?

Because intelligence is so much more than stochastically repeating stuff you've been trained on.

It needs to learn new information, create novel connections, be creative.. We are utterly clueless as to how the brain works and how intelligence is created.

We just took one cell, a neuron, made the simplest possible model of it, made some copies of it and you think it will suddenly spark into life by throwing GPUs at it ?

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

#247

Post by numpad0 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #170
Spooky23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking. I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car. When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American…

> 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.

I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter.

Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.

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

#248

Post by spiresofagartha »

subscribed wrote: post #221
janalsncm wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what's it?

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

#249

Post by jimbohn »

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…

The AGI argument assumes there is a 0 -> 1 moment where the model suddenly becomes "AGI" and starts performing miraculous tasks, accompanied by recursive self-improvement. So far, our experience shows that we are getting incremental improvements over time from different companies.

These things are being commoditized, and we are still at the start of the curve when it comes to hardware, data centers, etc.

Arguing for an all-in civilization/country bet on AGI given this premise, is either foolish or a sign that you are selling "AGI"

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

#250

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

nvader wrote: post #180
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…

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me.

It is very britlle.

The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation.

That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.

But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.

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