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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

#531

Post by nickff »

softwaredoug wrote: post #498

Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best blue collar investments the country could make right now Industries in the US are at an inflection point, with govt / global market giving conflicting signals. For example car manufacturers need to decide whether to invest in EVs, which is a huge capital investment they won't see return on for maybe a decade. If they dont invest, they won't be relevant out…

>"Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best blue collar investments the country could make right now"

People have been saying this for 20 years, and it seems plausible, but it hasn't really worked out (so far).

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

#532

Post by musebox35 »

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…

While I agree with the general sentiment on throwaway compute infra, the generated know-how with large scale experiments is not thrown away. I think a lot hinges on the scaling laws and whether you will hit the jackpot at a certain scale before everyone else. This is hard to guesstimate so someone has to do it in the spirit of empiricism. This might sound a lot like gambling or exploring depending on your sentiment. So, I think it is more justified to criticize the scale and the risks than the spirit of these investments.

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

#533

Post by manquer »

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…

Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow.

Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.

In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.

The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.

We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.

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

#534

Post by trenchpilgrim »

mbesto wrote: post #453
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.

And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases. Source - I…

Nobody in this thread has mentioned warranty periods. The original comment was about the hardware lifecycle, claiming the hardware was only commercially viable for months. The 3 year number that people are tossing around came from a discredited interview that made the rounds on social media a while back: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

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

#535

Post by dron57 »

dluan wrote: post #287
RataNova wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one

From China to America, where those original factory jobs went from America to China, and maybe AI at some point is destined to head there too. Also, I was born in that factory town and I'm currently writing this in Shanghai, where I'm trying to relocate to in hopes of better career/entrepreneurial opportunities lmao. The world is funny sometimes.

Do you think Shanghai has better career opportunities?

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

#536

Post by helltone »

criddell wrote: post #518
nradov wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate. https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html

Wow - super automated and they still employ 11,000 people?

The goal of automation is not necessarily reduce personnel, it could be increased reliability, reduced risk to life, reducing waste from scraps, faster lead time, etc

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

#537

Post by throwup238 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #517
ACCount37 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".

Something newer. The reason that 50-year-old machine tools are still around isn't that they can't be replaced. It's that there's often no reason to. To use OP as an example, in a lot of places, you'll find an ancient milling machine or a lathe that's dedicated to running a single job a few times a year. The machine was depreciated decades ago, but it can still do that job and there's no reason to get rid of it. What…

> What modern tools give you is speed and flexibility.

Many of the modern tools can also be grafted onto the old tools. Not just CNC conversions but the biggest productivity boost when I worked in a shop was converting everything to a zero point clamping system.

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

#538

Post by lysace »

epolanski wrote: post #526
lysace wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Valuation models probably begin to break down when the potential payoff is control of our solar system as we know it.

OTOH it seems like mere single billions can buy control over the US if you're brazen enough, so perhaps these stock market suckers are overpaying with their trillions.

I wonder how expensive it would be to buy control of PRC in a similarly creative (but very different) way.

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

#539

Post by GolfPopper »

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…

Even if LLMs don't become AGI (and I don't think they will), LLMs are potentially superb disinformation generators able to operate at massive scale. Modern society was already having difficulty holding onto consensus reality. "AI" may be able to break it.

Don't think "smart human". Think about a few trillion scam artists who cannot be distinguished from a real person except by face to face conversation.

Your every avenue of modern communication and information being innundate by note-perfect 419 scams, forever.

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

#540

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

bluGill wrote: post #413
trollbridge wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they…

> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around. The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.

From a worker’s perspective management will usually be evil by necessity. Staying aware of that may be a necessary mechanism in the US that isn’t so necessary in other countries with different cultures and labor protections.
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