also a literal gold rush
Actually which has added more market cap in the past 2 years, gold or the entire tech sector?
America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
641–650 of 753 posts
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.
Yeah, nobody in the US is working on that at all... https://www.boringcompany.com/
I’d strongly recommend that you watch this video: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid”.[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g (22:05)
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Nothing is but is that what's happening? Huge bets were made on the Internet technology in the US and it paid off even with the dot com bubble bursting. If we don't stay on top of technology then we will simply be passed by China. People also said the Internet was going revolutionize everything in the 90s and it did. AI is already pretty impressive and we are just in the infancy of the technology.
The thing is, China seems to be able to keep up with much less invested. I don't know how much it took for them to create DeepSeek and their other power efficient models, but it sure doesn't take much to run them. Meanwhile American AI seems to have a limitless hunger for energy.
Then we should become more efficient. I do get your point that the amount of money available as investment could be responsible for inefficient growth (because the focus is only on the goal).
A solution could be competition locally by a more efficient implementations. There might also be push back by local populations if it causes energy prices to rise.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a condemnation of zoning laws artificially restricting the market for housing, which ironically only came about after that period of relative abundance
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
You're proving my point. Hardware's lifecycle is based on warranty - that's it. The parent comment was: > Data centre hardware is more like 3 years. That comment is actually referencing the standard warranty period (which is indeed typically 3 years), which may or may not be consistent with the useful life of server hardware (which is much more subjective and varies based on appliance).
Not that immediate parent comment. This original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575908
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production. The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west -…
They're automating the production of many items not just cars https://archive.ph/DuZGe >The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
I know, that’s not what I was saying :)
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#647Earlier 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 do all these machine shops without any need for modern machinery and processes actually do ? Seriously though, of course you can make a living with old tools - however, even the village metal workshop around here has at least one big-ass laser cutter and a CNC mill next to all their old(er) lathes, mills, brakes, presses and other toys. Many oldschool fabricators I spoke to over the last few years are quite inte…
No one said that they had no need for modern machinery. It's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. If you have a manufacturing process that was dialed in perfectly 20 years ago, and your customer(s) is still buying those parts, made on that machine, there is no benefit to moving them to another machine that now has to be set up just right, have the new parts coming off it QC'd to make sure that they are identical to what came off the old one, etc.
It's work that you don't need to do and that you won't get paid for. If the old machine breaks, then maybe it would make sense to move the job to something newer.
I used to work with someone whose entire business was retrofitting old machine tools with modern controllers when the decades-old electronics failed. You'd be amazed how much of this stuff is still out there.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are made up in sense of it being some kind huge pending disaster for China. Also, trends can reverse with the right policies.
The disaster is a classic train wreck in super slow motion best proxied by 30-year government bond yield, currently the highest on the curve at 2.27.
Meh, the same usual suspects doing the predicting have been wildly wrong on nearly all things China for the past 30 years.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#649Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#650What many Americans don't realize is that China has already surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1 cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts. source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Be…
While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea. With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime, it's that the crime i…
I think you over estimate the control and under estimate the need for flexibility for any society to operate. Let's just say even in China, identity can be a commodity. For example scammers are known to buy bank accounts by paying poor people in remote areas. The system needs flexibility otherwise a majority of people will run into problems all the time.