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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

#201

Post by dax_ »

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…

It's just as possible that they need to invest more and more for negligible improvements to model performance. These companies are burning through money at an astonishing rate.

And as the internet deteriorates due to AI slop, finding good training material will become increasingly difficult. It's already happening that incorrect AI generated information is being cited as source for new AI answers.

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

#202

Post by lmm »

kube-system wrote: post #129
lesuorac wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hire deaf people? I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like pretty funny.

US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job. US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work. Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for emergency vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBD…

> US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job.

> US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.

So it would be reasonably possible, but since it's not legally required they'd rather make their workers miserable for no benefit, and then complain how difficult it is to hire people?

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

#203

Post by DannyBee »

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.

"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 physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed.

There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.

Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.

This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.

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

#205

Post by nxm »

saubeidl wrote: post #204

The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.

EU regs will ensure that never happens

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

#206

Post by atleastoptimal »

saubeidl wrote: post #200
atleastoptimal wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like stochastic parrots.

The same arguments are always brought up, often short pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems silly that despite this argument first emerging when LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is still being made with little interrogation into its potential faults, or clarification on the precise boundary of intelligence LLM's will never be able to cross.

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

#207

Post by saubeidl »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #206
saubeidl wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like stochastic parrots. The same arguments are always brought up, often short pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems silly that despite this argument first emerging when LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is still being made wi…

Which novel idea have LLMs brought forward so far?

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

#208

Post by saubeidl »

nxm wrote: post #205
saubeidl wrote: post #204

The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.

EU regs will ensure that never happens

EU regs will ensure that happens. They are a power projection tool. We've bent Apple to our will, we've made the whole world follow GDPR.

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

#209

Post by walthamstow »

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.

Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.

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

#210

Post by AliceH0521 »

shawn_w wrote: post #157
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…

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.

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