South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by taneq » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #192

gavinsyancey wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally: * Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here. * Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot ac…

Totally agree. I'd also point out that what makes this whole thing smell of being a grift is the fact that what's being chased is humanoid. Humans are not the pinnacle of dexterity or stability. And freed from biological constraints, it makes no sense why we'd use the human form as a reference. Making a humanoid robot is a hard thing to do, for sure, but it's also not particularly useful. The routines needed to balan…

Our hands are actually amazing, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend unless you’ve tried to build something equivalent. Our finger tips can discern features down to around 10 microns, detect a wide range of vibrations and single shocks, manipulate objects two orders of magnitude smaller than them, grasp an incredible range of weird shapes and materials reliably, repeat pre-learned motions remarkably quickly, and with training carry kilograms, all while weighing about a kilogram and reliably operating maintenance free for tens of thousands of hours. Oh and they’re made of meat.

An artificial manipulator with even half of these features would be the holy grail of robotics. Doing them all at once is a miracle.

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

#212

Post by cogman10 » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #211

cogman10 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I'd also point out that what makes this whole thing smell of being a grift is the fact that what's being chased is humanoid. Humans are not the pinnacle of dexterity or stability. And freed from biological constraints, it makes no sense why we'd use the human form as a reference. Making a humanoid robot is a hard thing to do, for sure, but it's also not particularly useful. The routines needed to balan…

Our hands are actually amazing, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend unless you’ve tried to build something equivalent. Our finger tips can discern features down to around 10 microns, detect a wide range of vibrations and single shocks, manipulate objects two orders of magnitude smaller than them, grasp an incredible range of weird shapes and materials reliably, repeat pre-learned motions remarkably quickly, and wit…

Completely agree. My point is more that even though our hands are amazing and even if we decided we want all the features of hands, there's no reason why you'd design such a device with 5 fingers and an oddly placed opposable thumb. There's no reason you'd have more than 2 joints per finger.

That's what I'm calling a grift of the humanoid robots. They are focusing pretty heavily on making manipulators shaped like hands, which don't perform anywhere near hand capabilities. The form is mattering more than the functionality which introduces a lot of unnecessarily hard to solve functionality problems.

The actual hard part of doing something like folding cloths isn't even the manipulation (though it's part of it) you mostly just need a few pincers. The hard part is that fabric changes like crazy in a 3 dimensional way on every motion. Just identifying "this is a shirt" is a hard problem to solve. Further deciding how to fold said shirt is extra difficult. But even further, getting a robot to know "this is where this shirt should be put away" and "this is how I should handle new cloths" is crazy hard. That's the part that I've seen absolutely no evidence that any of these humanoid robots are making any sort of progress on. The most impressive ones are cheating with a guy in the room over doing the task. Not exactly something I'd want in my home. Perhaps in a nuclear reactor.

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

#213

Post by protocolture » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

pingou wrote: post #127

protocolture wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045. I dont see it, unless this is an expectation that a robot will work for 50 years without maintenance at capex. Why doesnt a comparable tool, like an excavator, work with this math? Why arent they 100 times cheaper to run than 20 years ago? Excav…

Because supposedly they would repair themselves or be repaired by other robots, and energy would cost less and less, anything would cost less and less if work is increasingly done by robots than can be improved year after year.

Thats a pretty huge assumption.

It reminds me of predictions for the cloud, that someone would just write a perfect cloud formation script and then be able to sack all of their employees. But instead it just updated a lot of System Engineers to Cloud Engineers and Devops positions.

The direct implication is that not only will robots definitely be allowed into human spaces, and definitely be able to use generalised hardware to perform fine detail technical work but also contain only servicable/replacable parts.

I dont see any of that as proven. I think its far more likely that a very limited subset of robots will be allowed to be near humans at all, and insurance for them is going to be extremely expensive. I think if I had a look at Australian law they would be considered Plant, guaranteed if they have any pressurized components or strong lift capability. Maintenance, is going to cost an arm and a leg, and the units themselves will be largely proprietary, so you are looking at ongoing maintenance via the vendor, much like what the tractor industry is working on.

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

#214

Post by OkayPhysicist » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #140

dyauspitr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

From what I've seen with Waymo, autonomous driving in relatively good conditions (light to medium rain, fog, or sunny) is a solved technical problem, even in small, winding streets. Snow is the next big hurdle, and they're actively working on that in Denver and Detroit.

They're being conservative with their rollout mostly because of civic issues. Most places do not have a legal framework for "what if your autonomous vehicle hits someone?" yet. Even if Waymos never were at fault for a collision with a person, you can always have cases like the one in Georgia back in October where a bicyclist wasn't looking where they were going and rammed into one. The shaky legal ground is a pretty big impediment right now, and that's in the US where we have much laxer laws about corporations killing people.

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

#215

Post by OkayPhysicist » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #68

jdw64 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of thos…

I believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have? When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship. What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indire…

New Mexico has (pockets of) exceptionally well-educated population. 3 of the top 100 counties for PhDs per capita are in New Mexico (including #1, Los Alamos).

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

#216

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 12:30 AM UTC

b112 wrote: post #208

Dylan16807 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

What do you think the production cost of RAM is? Even if we perfectly fixed competition and ended the AI bubble right now, I don't see how new RAM prices would drop below half the previous low point by 2030. Those fabs are legitimately ultra expensive, that's why almost all the RAM makers went out of business and we're left with the current cartel.

Also "massively reduced requirements for AI, so much so that we have 90% fewer servers despite the Jevons paradox" is not compatible with "high quality models make effective use of terabytes of memory" and "LLMs will be in everything".

And even if you could perfectly reuse all the memory out of the collapsing datacenters, that's not enough to make many of the phones and laptops you're describing. We'd need a 10x increase in manufacturing on top of the massive price drops, and even if we started building those fabs today they wouldn't be done in time (and we wouldn't have enough equipment to fill them).

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

#217

Post by yieldcrv » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #13

yieldcrv wrote: post #5

Better spend it now, people won’t need greater than 1.5tr parameter models and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects the glut will be enormous yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it

> 1.5tr parameter models Curious, what's this based off of?

utility that's good enough for a broad population

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

#218

Post by fakedang » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:53 AM UTC

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #215

fakedang wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have? When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship. What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indire…

New Mexico has (pockets of) exceptionally well-educated population. 3 of the top 100 counties for PhDs per capita are in New Mexico (including #1, Los Alamos).

That's precisely my point. You need both the talent and the investment to execute this. Simply stating "Asian culture" is a stretch at best. The Asian economies made a ton of investment into semiconductors from the 1990s onwards, which are paying off now. Los Alamos is a pocket of exceptional PhDs because of the US government's investment into the institutional projects as well as building the infrastructure to attract talent to come and work in the middle of nowhere. That ended up creating a broader ecosystem of innovation there. What has the German government done, except for creating policies and regulations to ensure incumbents remain powerful? India pumps out more STEM graduates than most of the world combined, but what does it have to show for that in semiconductor technology but for a few middling projects?

Los Alamos would still be a desert without USG giving it a few billion dollars every year.

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

#219

Post by whatever1 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:39 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #190

cherryteastain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts follo…

There were plenty of other DRAM manufacture before them as well. But the Boom and bust cycle wipe out those who weren't big enough or adequately prepared. Nearly every single DRAM cycle we go through the same thing. People are saying memory are so cheap we are going to get 32GB/ 64GB / 128GB very soon. Just like they did 2-3 years before. Then every single DRAM up cycle they were earning insane amount of money, with…

I don’t remember any time in recent history where demand skyrocketed so fast and so far away from supply. In previous cycles you mostly had supply driven shortages (remember all the fires?).

Maybe crypto surge was the closest to what we observe today? But again completely different magnitudes of demand. No company put 1T of capex for mining

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

#220

Post by darkwater » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:48 AM UTC

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #214

darkwater wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

From what I've seen with Waymo, autonomous driving in relatively good conditions (light to medium rain, fog, or sunny) is a solved technical problem, even in small, winding streets. Snow is the next big hurdle, and they're actively working on that in Denver and Detroit. They're being conservative with their rollout mostly because of civic issues. Most places do not have a legal framework for "what if your autonomous…

Yeah, I suspected that, but legislation and dealing with who is responsible and what happens if an autonomous vehicles directly kills/hurts someone or is involved in an accident it IS part of the problem, luckily.

Then, there will be concerns about the scaling costs. If it makes economical sense only in densely populated zones, what's the point? I mean, yes, it will be yet another business that works only in cities in that case, but that will not then make it universal as cars are.