Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 753 posts

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

#551

Post by lysace »

deadbabe wrote: post #544
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…

Once you can run a GPT5 level LLM locally on a device, it’s over. All this mighty infrastructure is no longer any more impressive than a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro in 2025. I think we’re 10 years away from that.

Have you tried the reasoning mode of Gemini Pro 2.5? https://aistudio.google.com/

It gives me the chills, thinking about when it has 1000x cheaper ~GPU compute.

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

#552

Post by walkabout »

manquer wrote: post #533
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 ca…

> 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.

Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975.

Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".

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

#553

Post by downrightmike »

ffsm8 wrote: post #272
janalsncm wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now. By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge , transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

~~~~~we could just hire them and buy their knowledge if it weren't for trade wars~~~~~~~

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

#554

Post by vonneumannstan »

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…

>I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers.

This is classic jevon's paradox. As efficiency increases so does demand.

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

#555

Post by downrightmike »

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

Deregulation and firms like Bain capital (Romney) parted out all those corporations to china.

You see the same process that destroyed Toys r Us and Sears more recently.

This was all on purpose to extract whatever could from the corpse or USA manufacturing

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

#556

Post by gmadsen »

deadbabe wrote: post #544
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…

Once you can run a GPT5 level LLM locally on a device, it’s over. All this mighty infrastructure is no longer any more impressive than a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro in 2025. I think we’re 10 years away from that.

10 years from now, the capabilities of gpt5 will be as relevant to AI as Atari is to modern gaming

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

#557

Post by kipchak »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #466
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…

> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me. There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy…

Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.

There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.

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

#558

Post by EliRivers »

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…

Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups

I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.

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

#559

Post by deanputney »

throwup238 wrote: post #537
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had not heard of zero point clamping. This video I found is extremely cool, I can see how that would save a lot of time and money in the shop!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrLri_RdgK8

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

#560

Post by Dylan16807 »

kenhwang wrote: post #541
Dylan16807 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type. Good to know. > So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar size did get heavier. If the minimum is 1% heavier and the maximum is 2% lighter then I would not say " did get heavier".

You can only make the argument that the Civic is "2% lighter" when it is being compared to a wagon; apples to oranges comparison that invalidates the whole comparison. They picked that specific year Accord because it's the same size as a sedan as that specific year Civic sedan, so it makes no sense to then compare the weight to the much larger Accord wagon variant. You might as well compare the sedan to a crossover t…

Okay I misread you then, but you're saying the 2000 Accord sedan only has one weight, while the Civic has a several percent range? If that's right then do we know which Civic trim is equivalent to the Accord?

If we know that trim is worth at least 6%, and we don't know how to align the cars, then the confidence interval around "1% to 7%" extends far enough to overlap some negative percents.

Post reply on HN