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Xiaomi's self-optimizing autonomous factory will make 10M+ phones a year
- amunozo 2y agoEverytime I see something like this I am more convinced that deep learning/AI focus should go away from language into other domains where it can make a bigger impact on less compute.
- rapsey 2y agoOf course it will. AI is driving a flood of development in robotics. A home robot is definitely coming in the next 10 years and an assembly line worker is going to be an extinct job.
- nradov 2y agoWe already have home robots in the form of vacuum cleaners. If you're referring to humanoid robots for domestic chores then forget it, 10 years is way too optimistic. The safety problems alone of having a powerful heavy robot moving around with people and pets will take decades to solve. AI in the form of LLMs is effectively impossible to test for safety critical applications with so few system constraints. The risk of product liability lawsuits will prevent this technology from being sold anytime soon. Some limited industrial use may be feasible because there the robots can be carefully monitored and have limited interactions with humans. Plus there are remaining hardware problems in terms of power and actuators that will take longer than 10 years to solve in a cost effective way.
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoSeems pessimistic. I already have an oven that can burn the house down, a dishwasher that might flood out my kitchen, a refrigerator that can fail and ruin a fortune in perishable foods. Hell, my lawn mower might remove a foot! Why is a robot that might step on the cat, somehow inconceivably more hazardous?
- FrojoS 2y agoThose examples are unlikely to kill you. A humanoid robot can. Let's say it quickly moves its arm on a collision course with your head. The arm can weigh around 10 kg. The impact can easily kill an adult. I'm a bit less pessimistic than OP. It's possible to run safety checks (e.g. collision avoidance) on a lower, deterministic level, and use generative, black box, 'AI' for higher-level planning.
- postalrat 2y agoLike animals the robot arm should also be compliment and not always be moving with full force because it is going to hit things even with active collision avoidance.
- numpad0 2y agoA lead filled baseball bat flying through space is always moving at full force unless some external force is applied.
- rapsey 2y agoWhy would it move quickly? There is zero reason for a humanoid home robot to move quickly.
- usrnm 2y agoNone of those appliances are autonomous
- rabf 2y agoInteresting article covering humanoid robots in development now: https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-humanoid-robot-demos https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...
- fnordpiglet 2y agoIt already has. Language is just the most accessible by most people. But deep learning is not new and is not newly applied to problems. But it’s unclear how much of this article is hype or new. Gigafactory was also supposed to be 100% automated in a much more difficult assembly than putting a few boards into a metal case and gluing a screen on. They failed in practice and balanced into something more practical. (I’d not even in this article they eventually nod that it’s not fully automated just the “important parts”)
- gardaani 2y agoPlaystation factory was also almost fully automated: "PlayStation 4 units come off the assembly line at a pace of about one every 30 seconds." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23748664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23748664
- brookst 2y agoThere are too many people and too much investment for there to be a singular focus or any coordinated shift in focus.
- xbmcuser 2y agoIt looks to me like China will move from using cheap labour to cheap electricity from renewables for its manufacturing a lot faster than the rest of the world can keep up.
- numpad0 2y agoEveryone had always been moving towards such direction at least since days of Charlie Chaplin... It's just that marketing automatically produced goods had always been strangely hard.
- Ekaros 2y agoWhatever you say about value of software. You still need to build machines and all the parts it runs on. Not to forget all parts of the building it runs on and all parts of the networks it connects to and everything to power it... Capability to manufacture full hardware stack is critical. China might not be top at the silicon chips, but they have extreme competence for below that.
- lossolo 2y agoThis. I wonder why people say India will be the next China, as if they are still living in the past. The future is about cheap energy powering robots, not cheap labor. The era of growth based solely on cheap labor is slowly ending with robotization.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoIndia, too, has solar radiation and wind. China does not have a monopoly on the ability to invest in renewables. It is doing an outstanding job of doing that, but if India wakes up, India can do it, too. At the end of the day - few countries have better solar radiation than India: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/energy/publication/solar-photovoltaic-power-potential-by-country https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/energy/publication/solar-... That's going to matter more than your ability to produce panels slightly cheaper.
- kkzz99 2y ago
- askvictor 2y agoThis is the kind of thing that's actually necessary for sending humans to Mars. But a couple of levels higher - we need an autonomous factory to build other autonomous factories, that can be packed into a launch vehicle (or assembled in space). Until we have auto-factories on Earth, Mars is but a pipe-dream.
- the_third_wave 2y ago> we need an autonomous factory to build other autonomous factories Good plan but let's start with something more simple than a phone factory. How about paperclips? Once that problem has been solved [1] we can be confident we can create the optimal Phone Maximiser. [1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- Mistletoe 2y agoI’m sorry but I remember quite recently when 3d printing was promised to do this and it failed miserably. Mostly made a lot of figurines. And a few specific use cases where it shines. Just as one would expect from a Gartner hype cycle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle We are currently in one for AI.
- askvictor 2y ago100% agree with you; don't care if it's about 3d printing, AI, or rockets. My point is that until we can build a fully autonomous factory on Earth, we're not going to Mars.
- rpdillon 2y ago> A Weibo post expands on this, one section translating roughly to the following: "the 100% self-developed 'Xiaomi Pengpai Intelligent Manufacturing Platform' is the brain of the factory, injecting soul into the factory, allowing the entire factory to have self-perception, self-decision-making, and self-execution capabilities, and can independently diagnose equipment problems, improve process flows, and realize full-scenario digital management from raw material procurement to delivery, becoming a true smart factory that can evolve by itself." I'm going to need a lot more detail before I can believe this. It's too much fluff to be taken at face value.
- nikanj 2y agoIt’s SAP or a similar ERP wearing a fake moustache
- falcor84 2y agoOr perhaps three ERP systems in a trench coat.
- jprd 2y agoI am POSITIVE that I'm reading way too far into this. I do not think it was on purpose, especially with the language difference, etc. I don't want to be the one to have to do this, but they named it xPIMP? A system that will make sure that it is optimizing output from the resources it has available?
- MichaelRo 2y agoWell they can make a billion for all I care, I'm done with Xiaomi. After =~ 10 years of using their increasingly buggy, crappy and at the same time expensive phones, I'm out. I'll still stay on Android since that's what I know to use (and to some extent, develop for), but for my next phone I'll reach deeper into my pocket for a Samsung. I heard good things of Google Pixel as well but meh ... too technical. Samsung's got a bit of glamour as well where I live. Here's a non-exhaustive list of the bugs on my Xiaomi phones: - Battery draining from 100% to 10% overnight, while in sleep mode, energy usage showing "screen activity". Goes on and off, I suppose depends when the Chinese government decides to do a data examination. - Video mode on the camera takes 10-30 seconds to start. If you plan to film Bigfoot, make sure you turn the camera on some minute before he makes his brief appearance. No update ever fixed this, if anything it broke other things as well and made it worse (sometimes it just hangs and never starts video mode). - Speaking of updates, the rule with Xiaomi is that any update will break more than it will fix. With guaranteed some new annoying crap, usually worse than what you're trying to fix. After my last Xiaomi slowed to a crawl, whenever I charged it it basically bricked itself, nothing but a hardware restart turned it back on, I broke my rule and updated. Only to end up with a notification "Looks like you performed a factory reset (spoilers: I didn't!). Connect to the network and restore MIUI" with two buttons "Not Now" and "Restore". Pressing "Not Now" will keep popping the annoying notification and "Restore", after taking an inordinate amount of time, fails. Great job, Xiaomi developers! - Taking pictures is fine but to examine them I need the patience of a saint. For 20-30 seconds or more it just hangs and shows me a white preview. I guess it needs to pass them through the Chinese cloud for approval first or something. One workaround I found is to take a picture, open gallery, press "share" on the white loading crap and send it to WhatsApp. I can then examine it in WhatsApp while Galery still hangs on Chinese cloud AI processing. Fuck Xiaomi! Never again!
- jiyinyiyong 2y agocurious which model of Xiaomi phone you are using
- written-beyond 2y agoIdk man I've had a Xiaomi Redmi phone for over 4 years and it's honestly a rock solid stable device that hasn't given me any need to switch yet. Camera is decent, screen is good, battery life is good, performance is good. Like honestly, I'd probably never buy a flagship from them, but for a beater phone I wouldn't get anything else.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y agoTurns out unemployement is rising due to automation, not "economic collapse" :')
- norman784 2y agoWell a lot of jobs should be automated and more so those jobs that the pay check is low, but also another categories of jobs will be created, it might generate some unemployment but also new opportunities, how many jobs the computer took away and how many it generated?
- makeitdouble 2y agoTheir YouTube channel also posts some factory overviews from time to time: https://youtu.be/v6jb6PP4APc?si=nIYxsEJkWD-B-ZEL https://youtu.be/v6jb6PP4APc?si=nIYxsEJkWD-B-ZEL
- vessenes 2y agoThese claims are just on the edge of believable to me, but tantalizing -- they say pretty clearly you can dump a product spec (which I imagine is still a highly specific CAD file of some sort, not a "make me a cool phone" type instruction), and the software side of the factory can instrument raw material production into a final product. I don't think there are any steps in this process that couldn't be automated with today's tech; however I bet there are a lot of steps in this process that have a human checking in and approving or clicking 'redo' right now. Taking the step to add self perception, hooking up sensors to everything is smart and very interesting, adding logistics connectivity is very interesting, basically the whole thing is intriguing. I have a lot of questions, though -- it seems like it's 10 years too early to have this working -- but if you're planning long range, the experience here will almost certainly be baseline work you need done for building a better more successful autonomous factory over the next few iterations. It would be an incredible production advantage for the company that's first to really getting to 'automated automated' -- once you had that platform, you could point it a lot of places.
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