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

washingtonpost.com

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

#11

Post by smt88 »

vkou wrote: post #5
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back. It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.

Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop.

AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.

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

#12

Post by kasey_junk »

ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence you could get around those constraints.

The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.

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

#13

Post by nostrademons »

ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

I've heard that the general transformer architecture (not specifically LLMs, which imply a language model, but applied to sensory perceptions and outputting motor commands) has actually been fairly successful when applied to robotics. You want your overall assembly line to have a tiny, repeatable instruction set, but inside each of those individual instructions is oftentimes a complex motion that's very dependent upon chaotic physical realities. Think of being able to orient a part or deal with a stuck bolt, for example. AI Transformers potentially would allow us to replace several steps in the assembly that currently require human workers with robots, and that in turn makes the rest of the assembly much more reproducible (and cheaper).

Training these models takes a bunch more time, because you first need to build special hardware that allows a human to do these motions while having a computer record all the sensor inputs and outputs, and then you need to have the human do them a few thousand times, while LLMs just scrape all the content on the Internet. But it's potentially a lot more impactful, because it allows robots to impact the physical world and not just the printed word.

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

#14

Post by 1970-01-01 »

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.

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

#16

Post by ummonk »

smt88 wrote: post #11
vkou wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back. It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.

Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop. AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.

Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.

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

#17

Post by arcbyte »

ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

Manufacturing robotics is all about movement. All movement exists on a spectrum of difficulty and context needed to perform. For instance, welding the steel plates together in an empty and repeatable consistent 3d space is now on the lower end of difficulty. Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly difficult for a robot to do.

The more we can bring down all the difficulty of all these processes, the more we can accelerate manufacturing locally.

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

#18

Post by 0xcafefood »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #14
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.

FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.

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

#19

Post by credit_guy »

ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

That's not how the LLMs should be used in manufacturing. It is still the current assembly lines robots that will do that. LLMs can be used by the humans who design the automation workflow, as coding assistants. That can lower the breakeven number of items that can be automated. Maybe if today it only makes sense to automate the manufacturing of a widget only if you can sell more than 100000 of those widgets, then with LLM assistance that number can be reduced to 1000. Whenever you have a 10x improvement of something, there's scope for a mini-revolution to happen.

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

#20

Post by JohnMakin »

Bratmon wrote: post #7
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field of robotics.

To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
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