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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

#661

Post by atleastoptimal »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #246
atleastoptimal wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it ridiculous that an LLM or a system similar to or built off of an LLM could reach AGI?

Because intelligence is so much more than stochastically repeating stuff you've been trained on. It needs to learn new information, create novel connections, be creative.. We are utterly clueless as to how the brain works and how intelligence is created. We just took one cell, a neuron, made the simplest possible model of it, made some copies of it and you think it will suddenly spark into life by throwing GPUs at it…

>It needs to learn new information, create novel connections, be creative.

LLM's can do all those things

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

#662

Post by atleastoptimal »

saubeidl wrote: post #207
atleastoptimal wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like stochastic parrots. The same arguments are always brought up, often short pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems silly that despite this argument first emerging when LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is still being made wi…

Which novel idea have LLMs brought forward so far?

> Claim: gpt-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics.

>Proof: I took a convex optimization paper with a clean open problem in it and asked gpt-5-pro to work on it. It proved a better bound than what is in the paper, and I checked the proof it's correct.

https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/1958198661139009862

(please excuse the x link)

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

#663

Post by nemo44x »

trollbridge wrote: post #384
nemo44x wrote: post #323

Do we even have people to work in the factories? I know a guy who started as a worker and is now a plant manager and he says their biggest problem is finding qualified people (high school or equivalent) that are willing to show up every day. Many get their first check and then suddenly stop showing up and then return 2 or 3 weeks later looking for work. A lot of younger people it seems like value flexibility over hig…

Instead of blaming the workers, they should figure out how to make workers want to show up and find out the incentives they need. Here’s a start: daily pay (there are a bunch of fintechs out there that will do this for you). My buddy who does construction does this. It filters out people who need a quick fix of cash on day 1 instead of wasting two weeks on them. View labour unions as a friend, not an enemy, who will…

It’s not just pulling levers. These are manufacturing jobs that require some skill development. The starting pay is above median for the area.

There’s plenty of college educated people that are unemployed that refuse to enter this kind of work even though they’d quickly rise and make a lot of money. The other group is without any aim in their lives and can only plan a week or 2 out.

The workers that do reliably show up want nothing to do with unions because they are already compensated as well or better than a union could bargain for. It’s a workers market. Unions only work when it’s not as they exist to artificially limit the labor pool.

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

#664

Post by zevon »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #647
zevon wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iden…

Well, you kind said that literally. And I did not say that one should needlessly move processes to different infrastructure without a good reason. Anyway, I don't think our opinions are very dissimilar.

btw: I think I have a reasonably solid idea of a range of fabrication environments, the oldest piece of machinery I'm responsible for in my professional life is about 70 years old (its basic design is decades older) and some of my personal stuff (sewing machines, mostly) is more than 100 years old. I'm really not against using what works at all.

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

#665

Post by atleastoptimal »

theevilsharpie wrote: post #226
atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI. If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they pl…

You seem to have two separate claims. The first that it would be difficult to achieve AGI with current or proposed technology, and the second being that it would be difficult to control AGI, thus making it too risky to use or deploy.

The second is a significant open problem (the alignment problem) and I'd wager it is a very real risk which companies need to take more seriously. However, whether it would be feasible to control or direct an AGI towards reliably safe, useful outputs has no bearing on whether reaching AGI is possible via current methods. Current scaling gains and the rate of improvement (see METR's horizons on work an AI model can do reliably on its own) make it fairly plausible, at least more plausible than the plain denial that AGI is possible I see around here with very little evidence.

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

#666

Post by atleastoptimal »

lm28469 wrote: post #227
atleastoptimal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI. There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of…

> There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years So agi before autonomous tesla? "Just two more years guys I promise", how can people keep falling for these lol

Autonomous self-driving is almost solved basically with Waymo. I've ridden in them dozens of times without any issues.

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

#667

Post by atleastoptimal »

peterdsharpe wrote: post #257
atleastoptimal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI. There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of…

There is a beautiful irony in your misspelling of Anno Domini as Anno Domani, for the Italian speakers in the room.

True it is a misspelling, but does it have any bearing on my point?

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

#668

Post by atleastoptimal »

dax_ wrote: post #201
atleastoptimal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI. There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of…

It's just as possible that they need to invest more and more for negligible improvements to model performance. These companies are burning through money at an astonishing rate. And as the internet deteriorates due to AI slop, finding good training material will become increasingly difficult. It's already happening that incorrect AI generated information is being cited as source for new AI answers.

They are burning through money, but their revenue is scaling at a similar rate.

I'm sure most companies have understood the "AI outputs feeding AI's" incest issue for a while and have many methods to avoiding it. That's why so much has been put into synthetic data pipelines for years.

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

#669

Post by mbesto »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #645
mbesto wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know, and I'm explaining to you that I'm responding to that specific comment that you responded to. You're confusing the two things. Stop it.

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

#670

Post by atleastoptimal »

buellerbueller wrote: post #425
atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

Thats a nice assertion, but do you have any facts?

It is a reasonable common-sense claim that if a company which possesses a model that can perform all cognitive tasks as well as a human or better, that that model would be more powerful than any other technology available, barring significant limitations to its operation or deployment.
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