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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

#191

Post by noosphr »

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.

You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either.

There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.

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

#192

Post by alsetmusic »

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

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).

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

#193

Post by atleastoptimal »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #186
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

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 due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc

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

#194

Post by janalsncm »

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.

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

#195

Post by atleastoptimal »

alsetmusic wrote: post #192
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

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 trends which show no signs of stopping, it seems naive in Anno Domani 2025 to discount it as a likely possibility.

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

#196

Post by Gustomaximus »

Closi wrote: post #181
crote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid , they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Western lab…

> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production. The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west -…

I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.

It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.

Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.

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

#197

Post by 4gotunameagain »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #190
agubelu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming that's the case, everyone's acting like throwing more GPUs at the problem is somehow gonna get them to AGI

Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the problem. GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL, architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate of improvement we're seeing now.

The very idea that AGI will arise from LLMs is ridiculous at best.

Computer science hubris at its finest.

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

#198

Post by atleastoptimal »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #197
atleastoptimal wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the problem. GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL, architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate of improvement we're seeing now.

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?

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

#199

Post by saubeidl »

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

There is no proof "AGI" is a real thing. Any GDP put towards that goal is a huge gamble and the US is all-in, with potentially ruinous results.

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

#200

Post by saubeidl »

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 LLMs are just stochastic parrots and don't do any thinking.
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