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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

#521

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bluGill wrote: post #367
simmonmt wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155 Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll…

For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.

I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort.

I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.

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

#522

Post by grues-dinner »

nebula8804 wrote: post #228
protocolture wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items. Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with…

There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability.

Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!

Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.

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

#523

Post by lysace »

mrinterweb wrote: post #505

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…

Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).

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

#524

Post by sharadov »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #403
hyperbovine wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

I found R a better language for Data Science, somehow Python won out.

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

#525

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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

We still do. I think the Service Life of a Toyota Landcruiser is still 25 years. As a software developer, I've written control code for instruments that are expected to be on the market for at least 15-20 years from initial release and we have to plan Support and spare parts accordingly.

It's just that the fast-paced, built to last 6 months stuff gets all the good press.

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

#526

Post by epolanski »

lysace wrote: post #523
mrinterweb wrote: post #505

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…

Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).

Pretty much it, albeit I think very few appreciate how high's the risk of leaving with nothing in their hands.

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

#527

Post by F35Machinist »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #492
shawn_w wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's missed in that nostalgia: the house was crap; the appliances, if any, were crap; the car(if you had one, and only one), was crap. On and on.

That crap house hasn't been updated and is worth 200x currently in California. Houses that sold for 10k in the mid 70s are selling for 2 million or more in 2025. Cars, appliances and everything else is just a rounding error by comparison.

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

#529

Post by helltone »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #298
roenxi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.

I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there. It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come. Large scale automation using mostly wireless techno…

Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.

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

#530

Post by giancarlostoro »

7thaccount wrote: post #422
giancarlostoro wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment tha…

Python is one of my all time favorites, it is quirky, but nowhere near as quirky as JavaScript.
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