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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

#501

Post by card_zero »

ACCount37 wrote: post #494
myko wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this sentiment shared before and I just don't get it. What is the logical progression of "AI" to "more dangerous than the atomic bomb"?

Humans are dominating the environment by hopelessly outsmarting everything in it. Applied intelligence is extremely powerful . Humans, however, are not immune to being hopelessly outsmarted themselves. And what are we doing with AI now? We're trying to build systems that can do what human intelligence does - but cheaper, faster and more scalable. Multiple frontier labs have "AGI" - a complete system that matches or e…

This hierarchy-of-intelligence concept is meaningless.

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

#502

Post by thewebguyd »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #369
RataNova wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter

Did we, though? I am just not convinced. A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead. How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k. They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flou…

I think a lot of people conflate "built to last" with "ability to be repaired by yourself."

To continue the car analogy, I could replace almost any part easily, with simple tools I have at home, on my 1990 GMC 1500 truck. Parts are plentiful and cheap, plenty of room to work on the engine, nothing is hidden inside black boxes. It's got 280k miles on it and still running great.

To contrast that with my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek hybrid, is much more difficult to work on, can't even fit my hands to access anything that's not on the top of the engine, other repairs requiring full engine removal and specialized tools. There's more electronics and more completely sealed systems.

Same can be said about some household appliances, and even computers. Not only were things, generally more repairable, but repair didn't require specialized tools in most cases, we didn't have to first melt glue, resolder SSDs, etc.

My old compaq Armada may not have been built to last at the time, but it was certainly stupid easy to repair and replace every single component in it.

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

#503

Post by closeparen »

syntaxing wrote: post #295

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.

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

#504

Post by Der_Einzige »

hyperbovine wrote: post #385
tclancy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.

No one uses scipy for anything serious anymore in AI research or on any type of modern models.

You're setting your students up for failure if this is how you are teaching neural networks to them. You should switch to pytorch or at least something like tensorflow or jax or you are actively doing intellectual disservice to them and leading them to be actively noncompetitive both in AI academic paper writing/grad school and in the job market.

Similarly, use of sklearn considered harmful in a world where CuML/CuPY/Nvidia RAPIDS exists.

And also, knowledge of conda/pip/poetry considered harmful in a world where UV exists.

Teach MODERN tools please.

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

#505

Post by mrinterweb »

Investing in AI infrastructure seems very risky to me. With how short of a lifecycle computing hardware generally has, does it make sense to blow billions on hardware that will need to be replaced in a few years? AI companies have been burning billions on hardware. Will the costs of that hardware be covered by profits before the hardware lifecycle is up? That's a big gamble.

We used to talk about AI as having no moat (easy for other players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable?

There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes it that much more volatile.

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

#506

Post by renewiltord »

RataNova wrote: post #289
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…

It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter

I have a 4790k based machine standing unused by my desk (going to get the data off it and then get rid of it). Today's processors are so much better that if you used this one you'd be losing money on power.

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

#507

Post by ACCount37 »

card_zero wrote: post #501
ACCount37 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are dominating the environment by hopelessly outsmarting everything in it. Applied intelligence is extremely powerful . Humans, however, are not immune to being hopelessly outsmarted themselves. And what are we doing with AI now? We're trying to build systems that can do what human intelligence does - but cheaper, faster and more scalable. Multiple frontier labs have "AGI" - a complete system that matches or e…

This hierarchy-of-intelligence concept is meaningless.

You might as well have said "intelligence is meaningless". Obviously false.

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

#508

Post by renewiltord »

tclancy wrote: post #302
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…

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

Less interested in America's expensive and slow manufacturing than in Chinese processes. They can retool faster, handle far more volume, and except for specialized industries (medicine, aerospace) their quality is better.

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

#509

Post by bluGill »

Spooky23 wrote: post #479
bluGill wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out the…

In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example. Distribution centers are the more modern one. It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia…

We build in small cities. That is different from rural. The people live in the town.

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

#510

Post by Der_Einzige »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #378
kenhwang wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.

arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil. crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't making things heavy. e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-ve...

Another thing not mentioned by this poor article (everything forbes does these days is hot garbage), is that vehicles which are heavier do damage quartically proportional to their weight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

So the ever increasing weight of cars, trucks, SUVs, and especially semi-trucks is also responsible for our roads being shit, full of potholes, and expensive to fix.

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