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South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

arstechnica.com

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Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#201

Post by russli1993 »

bwfan123 wrote: post #110

> $585B on new fabs, This is how overcapacity happens in a commodity. The is a rush to expand capacity to meet demand, and there will be overshoot. I hope these factories are built quickly so the memory crunch eases.

if you look at the price per gb of memory, at today's prices its only equal to 2014. People don't complain about memory prices back then. The reality is modern world just need much more memory. Before 8GB memory was enough, today my 32GB memory is 95% used all the time due to chrome. And my 2TB SSD is filled with 4K HDR videos. This is not counting massive storage needs by datasets, AI models, KV caches, and bandwidth needed for LLM inferencing.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#202

Post by sometimelurker »

whatever1 wrote: post #4

I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!

apparently bosch semiconductor exists. whatever theyre doing over there they should do more of it tho, I want cheaper ram

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#203

Post by tonyhart7 »

kakacik wrote: post #178
tonyhart7 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its only hindsight, most people at those time didn't really foreseen the outcome later

This is untrue, entire eastern EU screamed like crazy against such immigration when she started importing immigrants en masse, "wir schaffen das". France faced the same with entire communities from Maghreb, most didn't work, 0 integration even after a generation or two spent in Europe, they knew language only if it was also their native one. Nobody in the east wanted that, entire political blocs before elections form…

You are racist

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#205

Post by stouset »

Schiendelman wrote: post #185
stouset wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think the opposite. Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now). In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and…

Are you familiar with Jevon's paradox? I think knowledge work is exploding.

Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted.

Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#206

Post by mikem170 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #186
mikem170 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people.

The elderly already have a significant regression in standard of living, often catastrophically. That's a pretty big problem I would like to improve. There are so many people who don't leave their house because they struggle to get clean and they're embarrassed, and then their social connections collapse. It's going to be a long time before we have the technology to really help with elder care, but boy is it worth it…

I agree, we could do so much better. Zoning can be a tremendous quality of life issue, and needing a car to participate in society is an expense other people in other places aren't burdened with.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#207

Post by Schiendelman »

stouset wrote: post #205
Schiendelman wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with Jevon's paradox? I think knowledge work is exploding.

Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted. Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of that analogy. Demand for farm labor has increased, but more of it is done by machines. The number of people employed in agriculture has increased if you include agriculture technology, over the same period. Not that I'm not saying the proportion of all humans working in agriculture has increased, I'm saying the raw number has, which is what matters to people along their lifetime.

Also, both the pay rates for agricultural labor and the pay for developing agricultural machinery are much higher than the pay for agricultural labor was in the past.

Knowledge work is an ever expanding umbrella, just as agricultural work is.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#208

Post by b112 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #158
b112 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The issue is "how is the thing used" not trying to make identical break points in differing tech. A self driving car cannot have object detection, collision avoidance, human detection offloaded to the cloud. Ever. At all. A network drop can't mean it smashes into things. Or stops unsafely. The same is true with an android. Imagine it turning on an frying pan, cooking dinner, and then going o…

I'm not missing the point. I'm saying that some amount of local compute is necessary but the really big stuff can be remote. You don't need terabytes to turn things back off. Not that I want to trust "not setting the house on fire" and "not flooding the house" to this kind of model in the first place... > I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM. I'll be astonished if they have…

Well there's only one reason, so you do indeed know why.

Here's the thing, by 2028, maybe 2029, 1/2 the cloud AI providers are going to go bankrupt, or severely downsize. This will likely be due to massive reduced power and processor requirements for AI. GPUs are a stopgap, and they won't be used much longer. When that happens, and the number of servers drops by 90%, along with similar power requirements, a lot of people are going to go tits up due to massive, empty datacentres and compute.

That will absolutely flood the market with cheap obsolete GPU + RAM, used servers, you name it. Current RAM prices will plummet, and those able to withstand the storm will have to compete again, not just ride the wave like they've been doing now.

RAM has been ridiculously high for a long time, it won't be by 2030.

Couple that with local SoC with dedicated compute for LLMs, and you have the perfect storm for local, on phone compute. Why this? Well, because LLMs will be in everything! Certainly in robots, autonomous weapons, and anything the crazies can shove it into. Phones won't be the unique case, it'll be sharing a hardware market with robots, and 100 other things using the same SoCs.

Local compute will be easy... RAM makes a massive difference, huge as you know, difference in local compute. And with the datacentre market in tatters, and people becoming more and more concerned about privacy, people will likely not want to whisper to a cloud LLM, about their fetishes for donkeys or moose or whatever turns their crank.

Not to mention, other aspects of their lives.

In as RAM will be super cheap, that's where I see this going.

I have a sneaking suspicion you don't agree with this assessment. I guess we'll come back here 2030 and see what's what.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#209

Post by scheme271 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #64
scheme271 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stair climbing systems that work using wheels exist. Google stair climbing wheelchairs for a few examples.

I am familiar, I'm a big fan of Dean Kamen's work. So far, we haven't seen a single wheeled stair climbing vacuum cleaner, even though the original iBOT is 23 years old. That solves the horizontal mobility problem. And then you have cabinets - and wheels don't solve the vertical mobility problem. So then you need a scissor lift on those wheels, or a hydraulic lift. The robotics nerds always end up back at bipedal bec…

A scissor lift or some other thing seems a lot simpler than trying to allow for a bipedal robot to knee to reach things close to the ground. Or if legs are the best option, why not a quadruped? Much more stability with a lot of the same advantages.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#210

Post by Schiendelman »

scheme271 wrote: post #209
Schiendelman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar, I'm a big fan of Dean Kamen's work. So far, we haven't seen a single wheeled stair climbing vacuum cleaner, even though the original iBOT is 23 years old. That solves the horizontal mobility problem. And then you have cabinets - and wheels don't solve the vertical mobility problem. So then you need a scissor lift on those wheels, or a hydraulic lift. The robotics nerds always end up back at bipedal bec…

A scissor lift or some other thing seems a lot simpler than trying to allow for a bipedal robot to knee to reach things close to the ground. Or if legs are the best option, why not a quadruped? Much more stability with a lot of the same advantages.

I'm curious - have you done any robotics work?
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