22 ms·

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

487 points by voxleone 1y ago

nashashmi 1y ago
I am perturbed by the power consumption of these behemoths causing high market prices for everyone.
- pengaru 1y ago
  We've been through this before; "history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
martinclayton 1y ago
https://archive.is/TY950 https://archive.is/TY950
nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly line.
- Bratmon 1y ago
  This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field of robotics.
  - JohnMakin 1y ago
    To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
- vkou 1y ago
  What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back. It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.
  - smt88 1y ago
    Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop. AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
    - ummonk 1y ago
      Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things. Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025 Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf] - https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China-2025-Successful-Summary.pdf https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China... - May 5th, 2025 ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker/ https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... - August 28th, 2024 > Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI is Too Big to Fail.
- ReliantGuyZ 1y ago
  I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
  - kasey_junk 1y ago
    I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence you could get around those constraints. The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.
    - crote 1y ago
      > existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product. Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless. One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing that with things like 3D printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is always going to be have significantly lower per-unit costs than ordering 1, and if you're ordering 1000 you can probably afford a human spending some time on setting up robots or optimizing the design for existing setups. There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead to a manufacturing revolution.
- Lapel2742 1y ago
  > factories with no humans on the assembly line. Not an American myself, but why should that be good for ordinary American citizens? Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?
  - smileson2 1y ago
    we're talking about what really matters here, the investors
  - bluGill 1y ago
    This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who are incapable of doing something else) There is the constant argument that what when machines do everything. We are not there yet, and so far there is no reason to think we will be anytime soon.
    - crote 1y ago
      > Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. If only. In reality they'll be as expensive as they can make them without completely killing sales, just like they are right now.
    - scared_together 1y ago
      > The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. Aren’t the creative jobs also being taken by LLMs and image generators?
    - vkou 1y ago
      > This is great for ordinary Americans. If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services. The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2] do the boring immigrant jobs. AI can't just handwave all this shit away because 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns or not, there's a massive backlash from various flavors of nativists about jobs. Why isn't it directed at all of these pie in the sky AI promises? --- [1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What difference does it make to me where a factory is located, when that factory doesn't employ me or my neighbours? The people collecting profits from it aren't going to share them with us. [2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job? Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.
  - 0xcafefood 1y ago
    FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.
    - InitialLastName 1y ago
      They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced cruise control as "full self-driving".
    - GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
      I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
- seydor 1y ago
  Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations. I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
  - jerlam 1y ago
    Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
- nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
  EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
- starky 1y ago
  This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."
madhacker 1y ago
Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
- 0_____0 1y ago
  It all drives ads All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
- gretch 1y ago
  I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years. Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war. It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    "we're all pursuing Ai to prepare ww3" isn't the argument you think it is
  - leptons 1y ago
    Hallucinating "AI" is going to take friendly fire to a whole new level.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lnsru 1y ago
Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
- thaack 1y ago
  > Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
    - stouset 1y ago
      The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent. Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
      - snozolli 1y ago
        there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay I do not believe this common claim.
runnr_az 1y ago
Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
mNovak 1y ago
The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment. [1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
- niek_pas 1y ago
  I'll admit I have not read this article incredibly thoroughly, but I don't see what you're claiming. The article is contrasting the growth of the AI industry with the slump in manufacturing. I don't think it's positing any causal link between the two.
bdcravens 1y ago
> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics That's 0.3%.
- some_guy_nobel 1y ago
  You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything. Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    The reason the percentage was included was to take the number out of isolation. What can mean anything is when people tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean anything. > Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses! You first!
    - some_guy_nobel 1y ago
      > You first! In any honest conversation, the person presenting the numbers will provide this, but I'll bite: How many years are cumulative negative in this table? https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=net_1mth https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=ne... (I guess the correct way to model this would be as the difference of Poissons between hires and separations, but a student-t should do just fine since we don't have separations)
- Kapura 1y ago
  down is down
- jimt1234 1y ago
  Feels like Milton from Office Space: I was told there would be a manufacturing boom.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people in manufacturing now takes less than 200.
mullingitover 1y ago
The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant. So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
- jasonsb 1y ago
  A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said, maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
  - coliveira 1y ago
    That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't force the world to do things forever because there is a dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy can work.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent. If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
lallysingh 1y ago
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
- amelius 1y ago
  It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
  - ares623 1y ago
    But for 20 sweet minutes just before the entire thing collapses, someone will get crowned the winner
bgwalter 1y ago
They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m): "Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones." In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
- justin66 1y ago
  They orchestrate partners!
- rubberband 1y ago
  This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@
- trollbridge 1y ago
  In other words, a middleman trying to extract big markups, which seems to be a lot of businesses these days (like W09 AirBNB).
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  WTF is this scam URL.
  - Bolwin 1y ago
    It's not a scam, it's a Twitter front-end
bhewes 1y ago
We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do see output increases.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Weird that it doesn't translate to any visible growth, everyone became a 10x employee, but if you exclude Ai companies themselves the GDP barely moved in 3 years.
  - bhewes 1y ago
    There maybe a lag we are talking 12-24 month projects on our end. But right AI spending is driving everything we will see how long application shows up.
    - lm28469 1y ago
      Llms have been there for 3 years now... Is it another "2 more weeks" promise, à la Musk
      - bhewes 1y ago
        Yes true, but lag to industry is closer to ten years. We definitely don't move fast. Example Oil and Gas is just touching LLMs. We took 15 years+ to move to the cloud which once everything was there we moved stuff back to the edge. There are racks now in the HQ towers (Devon Tower which wasn't designed to have any on perm DC setups now has two whole floors). And the actual factories, they barely have any kind of OT awareness. We help them, but who knows how long before they do much of anything.
fair_enough 1y ago
Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws. I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
- profsummergig 1y ago
  It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did. "We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"
  - nxm 1y ago
    When the ship is sinking the captain has to intervene
    - pessimizer 1y ago
      He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
      - danlugo92 1y ago
        You guys still do captains?
  - fair_enough 1y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people being billionaires "in theory". If someone makes billions of dollars doing something that adds $10 of value to my life, then God bless! The problem lies in practice- when they start bribing government officials to cheat regulations, and when they engage in all manner of anti-competitive malfeasance against their workers and their customers. In general, I'm skeptical of claims that only way to attain that kind of wealth is by screwing people, considering Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan built their wealth by being the best in the world at something hundreds of millions of people enjoy. I'm not convinced the mere act of being a billionaire makes someone an asshole, considering how much those two gave, especially to Chicago's South Side. However, I would support just enough of a wealth tax to prevent people from using their wealth to stifle the American dream.
mikewarot 1y ago
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 job, and possibly losing customers. 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.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  > hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
    - hansmayer 1y ago
      The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
      - iancmceachern 1y ago
        Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
        jaggederest 1y ago
        We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that. Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts. A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
classified 1y ago
And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  Whoever gets AGI first will just be another biobattery to power the matrix.
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  Why is that the case? If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much? We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence. OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.
  - atleastoptimal 1y ago
    My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc
    - thundoe 1y ago
      Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by their lifespan, they didn’t solve every problem, and each discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance to copy and stay in the race
      - 1y ago
saubeidl 1y ago
The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.
- nxm 1y ago
  EU regs will ensure that never happens
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    EU regs will ensure that happens. They are a power projection tool. We've bent Apple to our will, we've made the whole world follow GDPR.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      The world will bow down to mandatory cookie banners
      - saubeidl 1y ago
        Cookie banners are ePrivacy directive, not GDPR. GDPR is a lot more. See here for all the rights it grants you: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/information-individuals_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on ahead. I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters. Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth since services/product aren't antithetic.
gartdavis 1y ago
Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now. I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany. Three factors made this very difficult: -- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal. -- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work. -- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity. In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived. This would be much harder now. Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential. Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet. A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low. I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
shunia_huang 1y ago
Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries. No, it's not. It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products. It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future. Excuse my language/grammer.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices. If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to. The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
- mtrovo 1y ago
  > It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources Can you name a few items that you feel that way? My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.
- gabrielgio 1y ago
throw-10-13 1y ago
America will get what it deserves soon enough. The AI crash will be a catalyst for general instability and chaos with a fascist at the helm.
potato3732842 1y ago
I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private) developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more time doing the things that produce value.
dluan 1y ago
My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division. I don't really know what the lesson here is.
- ronbenton 1y ago
  Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go away—be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don’t think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come back but rather to find something else.
- RataNova 1y ago
  It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one
  - dluan 1y ago
    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.
    - dron57 1y ago
      Do you think Shanghai has better career opportunities?
      - dluan 1y ago
        After 15 years in Silicon Valley and San Francisco startup and tech scene, the future is absolutely in China.
      - 1y ago
RataNova 1y ago
What's worrying is that this "AI gold rush" feels eerily similar to past tech bubbles: lots of capital, lots of hype, and unclear long-term value
syntaxing 1y ago
I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.
- defraudbah 1y ago
  do you still create stuff for fun? As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era
  - syntaxing 1y ago
    I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But designing something for one or two pieces is very different from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even thousands.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily
- tim333 1y ago
  I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.
- closeparen 1y ago
  Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.
rmoriz 1y ago
Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or workflows/automation that will create value long after the generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines. Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to other humans or machines) is just so wrong.
usrxcghghj 1y ago
So funding research education and renewable energy would be the move as a country right .... ?
zerosizedweasle 1y ago
[flagged]
nemo44x 1y ago
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 higher pay. They’d rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within a year you’re promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you can put 5 responsible years in you’re certainly recruited to the management development path. These skills are highly transferable between companies.
- jrochkind1 1y ago
  Pretty weird that our society doesn't want immigrants if we could use more workers.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  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 figure out where to get more workers and how to keep them willing to show up to the job.
  - nemo44x 1y ago
    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.
throwaway529573 1y ago
[dead]
erichocean 1y ago
AI labor fixes this.
morshu9001 1y ago
also a literal gold rush
- notfed 1y ago
  underrated observation
- morshu9001 1y ago
  Actually which has added more market cap in the past 2 years, gold or the entire tech sector?
softwaredoug 1y ago
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 outside the few markets clinging religiously to ICEs Do you layout a billion dollars to try to stay relevant outside the US? Or stick to reliable, if soon shrinking, domestic internal combustion engine business model?[1] Contrast this with AI where signals are unambiguous from government and investors. 1 - As an example, this $1.6B charge GM is taking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-take-1-6-billion-charge-on-electric-vehicle-pullback https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-tak...
- nickff 1y ago
  >"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).
mrinterweb 1y ago
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 (easy for other players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable? There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes it that much more volatile.
- lysace 1y ago
  Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).
  - epolanski 1y ago
    Pretty much it, albeit I think very few appreciate how high's the risk of leaving with nothing in their hands.
    - lysace 1y ago
      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.
- musebox35 1y ago
  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.
conradev 1y ago
Well at least energy infrastructure is useful for both data centers and factories.
Animats 1y ago
Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has been visiting factories in China.[1] "Ford CEO Jim Farley said Chinese cars have "far superior" technology, lower costs and great quality." Ford is working on fixing this and getting a $30,000 EV out the door.[2] [1] https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-humbled/ https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-humbled... [2] https://archive.is/kUbEW https://archive.is/kUbEW
- jszymborski 1y ago
  Very different tact from GM, it seems https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7cbe https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7...
rednafi 1y ago
So far, the ROI has been much lower than expected. The hype certainly attracted a ton of investment, but aside from some code generation and summarization, I’ve yet to see any meaningful yield. The narrative claims that AI will make everyone far more productive, but in reality, I see people working harder than ever and burning out while maintaining this slop in production. AI search and summarization have been a flop, and most people I know hate them. LLMs are undoubtedly useful, but despite all the supposed productivity gains, I’m not seeing any measurable impact. I used to spend hours reviewing human-written PRs, and now I spend even more time because of lazy AI-generated garbage creeping into the codebase. Some AI parrots will say, “Oh, I never push code I don’t understand,” but that doesn’t stop others from doing it, and now you have to be extra vigilant during PR reviews. The gist is that everyone claims to be more productive, but the numbers say otherwise. Even so, LLMs are genuinely useful, just not nearly as much as the investment would suggest.
toephu2 1y ago
What 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 (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West. And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.
- therealpygon 1y ago
  What are some examples that might blow my mind?
  - augstein 1y ago
    Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network. The latter probably will never happen in the US.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.
      - basisword 1y ago
        I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.
stonemetal12 1y ago
US manufacturing hit an all time high of 2.9 trillion dollars in 2024, and is up year over year. Yeah totally failing.
- judahmeek 1y ago
  According to Google: "Slower growth: Despite the record output, some analyses reported that the overall growth of U.S. manufacturing output was modest, at just 1% in 2024. This reflected a lag between announced investments and new operational capacity coming online." So record output, but practically zero growth.

487 points by voxleone 1y ago

nashashmi 1y ago

I am perturbed by the power consumption of these behemoths causing high market prices for everyone.

pengaru 1y ago
We've been through this before; "history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

martinclayton 1y ago

https://archive.is/TY950 https://archive.is/TY950

nakamoto_damacy 1y ago

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly line.

Bratmon 1y ago
This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field of robotics.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
vkou 1y ago
What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back. It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.
- smt88 1y ago
  Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop. AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
  - ummonk 1y ago
    Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things. Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025 Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf] - https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China-2025-Successful-Summary.pdf https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China... - May 5th, 2025 ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker/ https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... - August 28th, 2024 > Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI is Too Big to Fail.
ReliantGuyZ 1y ago
I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence you could get around those constraints. The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.
  - crote 1y ago
    > existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product. Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless. One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing that with things like 3D printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is always going to be have significantly lower per-unit costs than ordering 1, and if you're ordering 1000 you can probably afford a human spending some time on setting up robots or optimizing the design for existing setups. There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead to a manufacturing revolution.
Lapel2742 1y ago
> factories with no humans on the assembly line. Not an American myself, but why should that be good for ordinary American citizens? Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?
- smileson2 1y ago
  we're talking about what really matters here, the investors
- bluGill 1y ago
  This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who are incapable of doing something else) There is the constant argument that what when machines do everything. We are not there yet, and so far there is no reason to think we will be anytime soon.
  - crote 1y ago
    > Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. If only. In reality they'll be as expensive as they can make them without completely killing sales, just like they are right now.
  - scared_together 1y ago
    > The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. Aren’t the creative jobs also being taken by LLMs and image generators?
  - vkou 1y ago
    > This is great for ordinary Americans. If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services. The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2] do the boring immigrant jobs. AI can't just handwave all this shit away because 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns or not, there's a massive backlash from various flavors of nativists about jobs. Why isn't it directed at all of these pie in the sky AI promises? --- [1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What difference does it make to me where a factory is located, when that factory doesn't employ me or my neighbours? The people collecting profits from it aren't going to share them with us. [2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job? Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.
- 0xcafefood 1y ago
  FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.
  - InitialLastName 1y ago
    They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced cruise control as "full self-driving".
  - GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
    I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
seydor 1y ago
Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations. I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
- jerlam 1y ago
  Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
starky 1y ago
This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."

madhacker 1y ago

Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.

0_____0 1y ago
It all drives ads All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
gretch 1y ago
I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years. Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war. It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.
- lm28469 1y ago
  "we're all pursuing Ai to prepare ww3" isn't the argument you think it is
- leptons 1y ago
  Hallucinating "AI" is going to take friendly fire to a whole new level.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lnsru 1y ago

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

thaack 1y ago
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
  - stouset 1y ago
    The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent. Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
    - snozolli 1y ago
      there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay I do not believe this common claim.

runnr_az 1y ago

Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.

mNovak 1y ago

The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment. [1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"

niek_pas 1y ago
I'll admit I have not read this article incredibly thoroughly, but I don't see what you're claiming. The article is contrasting the growth of the AI industry with the slump in manufacturing. I don't think it's positing any causal link between the two.

bdcravens 1y ago

> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics That's 0.3%.

some_guy_nobel 1y ago
You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything. Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
- pessimizer 1y ago
  The reason the percentage was included was to take the number out of isolation. What can mean anything is when people tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean anything. > Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses! You first!
  - some_guy_nobel 1y ago
    > You first! In any honest conversation, the person presenting the numbers will provide this, but I'll bite: How many years are cumulative negative in this table? https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=net_1mth https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=ne... (I guess the correct way to model this would be as the difference of Poissons between hires and separations, but a student-t should do just fine since we don't have separations)
Kapura 1y ago
down is down
jimt1234 1y ago
Feels like Milton from Office Space: I was told there would be a manufacturing boom.
- bluGill 1y ago
  There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people in manufacturing now takes less than 200.

mullingitover 1y ago

The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant. So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.

jasonsb 1y ago
A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said, maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
- coliveira 1y ago
  That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't force the world to do things forever because there is a dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy can work.
Barrin92 1y ago
>Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent. If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.

lallysingh 1y ago

My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.

amelius 1y ago
It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
- ares623 1y ago
  But for 20 sweet minutes just before the entire thing collapses, someone will get crowned the winner

bgwalter 1y ago

They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m): "Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones." In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.

justin66 1y ago
They orchestrate partners!
rubberband 1y ago
This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@
trollbridge 1y ago
In other words, a middleman trying to extract big markups, which seems to be a lot of businesses these days (like W09 AirBNB).
stackedinserter 1y ago
WTF is this scam URL.
- Bolwin 1y ago
  It's not a scam, it's a Twitter front-end

bhewes 1y ago

We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do see output increases.

lm28469 1y ago
Weird that it doesn't translate to any visible growth, everyone became a 10x employee, but if you exclude Ai companies themselves the GDP barely moved in 3 years.
- bhewes 1y ago
  There maybe a lag we are talking 12-24 month projects on our end. But right AI spending is driving everything we will see how long application shows up.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    Llms have been there for 3 years now... Is it another "2 more weeks" promise, à la Musk
    - bhewes 1y ago
      Yes true, but lag to industry is closer to ten years. We definitely don't move fast. Example Oil and Gas is just touching LLMs. We took 15 years+ to move to the cloud which once everything was there we moved stuff back to the edge. There are racks now in the HQ towers (Devon Tower which wasn't designed to have any on perm DC setups now has two whole floors). And the actual factories, they barely have any kind of OT awareness. We help them, but who knows how long before they do much of anything.

fair_enough 1y ago

Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws. I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.

profsummergig 1y ago
It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did. "We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"
- nxm 1y ago
  When the ship is sinking the captain has to intervene
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
    - danlugo92 1y ago
      You guys still do captains?
- fair_enough 1y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people being billionaires "in theory". If someone makes billions of dollars doing something that adds $10 of value to my life, then God bless! The problem lies in practice- when they start bribing government officials to cheat regulations, and when they engage in all manner of anti-competitive malfeasance against their workers and their customers. In general, I'm skeptical of claims that only way to attain that kind of wealth is by screwing people, considering Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan built their wealth by being the best in the world at something hundreds of millions of people enjoy. I'm not convinced the mere act of being a billionaire makes someone an asshole, considering how much those two gave, especially to Chicago's South Side. However, I would support just enough of a wealth tax to prevent people from using their wealth to stifle the American dream.

mikewarot 1y ago

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 job, and possibly losing customers. 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.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
  - hansmayer 1y ago
    The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
      - jaggederest 1y ago
        We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that. Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts. A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.

classified 1y ago

And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

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

buellerbueller 1y ago
Whoever gets AGI first will just be another biobattery to power the matrix.
rhubarbtree 1y ago
Why is that the case? If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much? We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence. OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc
  - thundoe 1y ago
    Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by their lifespan, they didn’t solve every problem, and each discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance to copy and stay in the race
    - 1y ago

saubeidl 1y ago

The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.

nxm 1y ago
EU regs will ensure that never happens
- saubeidl 1y ago
  EU regs will ensure that happens. They are a power projection tool. We've bent Apple to our will, we've made the whole world follow GDPR.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    The world will bow down to mandatory cookie banners
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      Cookie banners are ePrivacy directive, not GDPR. GDPR is a lot more. See here for all the rights it grants you: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/information-individuals_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on ahead. I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters. Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth since services/product aren't antithetic.

gartdavis 1y ago

Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now. I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany. Three factors made this very difficult: -- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal. -- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work. -- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity. In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived. This would be much harder now. Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential. Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet. A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low. I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.

shunia_huang 1y ago

Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries. No, it's not. It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products. It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future. Excuse my language/grammer.

constantcrying 1y ago
Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices. If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to. The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
mtrovo 1y ago
> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources Can you name a few items that you feel that way? My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.
gabrielgio 1y ago

throw-10-13 1y ago

America will get what it deserves soon enough. The AI crash will be a catalyst for general instability and chaos with a fascist at the helm.

potato3732842 1y ago

I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private) developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more time doing the things that produce value.

dluan 1y ago

My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division. I don't really know what the lesson here is.

ronbenton 1y ago
Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go away—be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don’t think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come back but rather to find something else.
RataNova 1y ago
It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one
- dluan 1y ago
  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.
  - dron57 1y ago
    Do you think Shanghai has better career opportunities?
    - dluan 1y ago
      After 15 years in Silicon Valley and San Francisco startup and tech scene, the future is absolutely in China.
    - 1y ago

RataNova 1y ago

What's worrying is that this "AI gold rush" feels eerily similar to past tech bubbles: lots of capital, lots of hype, and unclear long-term value

syntaxing 1y ago

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

defraudbah 1y ago
do you still create stuff for fun? As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era
- syntaxing 1y ago
  I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But designing something for one or two pieces is very different from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even thousands.
EasyMark 1y ago
I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily
tim333 1y ago
I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.
closeparen 1y ago
Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.

rmoriz 1y ago

Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or workflows/automation that will create value long after the generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines. Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to other humans or machines) is just so wrong.

usrxcghghj 1y ago

So funding research education and renewable energy would be the move as a country right .... ?

zerosizedweasle 1y ago

[flagged]

nemo44x 1y ago

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 higher pay. They’d rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within a year you’re promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you can put 5 responsible years in you’re certainly recruited to the management development path. These skills are highly transferable between companies.

jrochkind1 1y ago
Pretty weird that our society doesn't want immigrants if we could use more workers.
trollbridge 1y ago
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 figure out where to get more workers and how to keep them willing to show up to the job.
- nemo44x 1y ago
  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.

throwaway529573 1y ago

[dead]

erichocean 1y ago

AI labor fixes this.

morshu9001 1y ago

also a literal gold rush

notfed 1y ago
underrated observation
morshu9001 1y ago
Actually which has added more market cap in the past 2 years, gold or the entire tech sector?

softwaredoug 1y ago

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 outside the few markets clinging religiously to ICEs Do you layout a billion dollars to try to stay relevant outside the US? Or stick to reliable, if soon shrinking, domestic internal combustion engine business model?[1] Contrast this with AI where signals are unambiguous from government and investors. 1 - As an example, this $1.6B charge GM is taking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-take-1-6-billion-charge-on-electric-vehicle-pullback https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-tak...

nickff 1y ago
>"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).

mrinterweb 1y ago

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 (easy for other players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable? There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes it that much more volatile.

lysace 1y ago
Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).
- epolanski 1y ago
  Pretty much it, albeit I think very few appreciate how high's the risk of leaving with nothing in their hands.
  - lysace 1y ago
    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.
musebox35 1y ago
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.

conradev 1y ago

Well at least energy infrastructure is useful for both data centers and factories.

Animats 1y ago

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has been visiting factories in China.[1] "Ford CEO Jim Farley said Chinese cars have "far superior" technology, lower costs and great quality." Ford is working on fixing this and getting a $30,000 EV out the door.[2] [1] https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-humbled/ https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-humbled... [2] https://archive.is/kUbEW https://archive.is/kUbEW

jszymborski 1y ago
Very different tact from GM, it seems https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7cbe https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7...

rednafi 1y ago

So far, the ROI has been much lower than expected. The hype certainly attracted a ton of investment, but aside from some code generation and summarization, I’ve yet to see any meaningful yield. The narrative claims that AI will make everyone far more productive, but in reality, I see people working harder than ever and burning out while maintaining this slop in production. AI search and summarization have been a flop, and most people I know hate them. LLMs are undoubtedly useful, but despite all the supposed productivity gains, I’m not seeing any measurable impact. I used to spend hours reviewing human-written PRs, and now I spend even more time because of lazy AI-generated garbage creeping into the codebase. Some AI parrots will say, “Oh, I never push code I don’t understand,” but that doesn’t stop others from doing it, and now you have to be extra vigilant during PR reviews. The gist is that everyone claims to be more productive, but the numbers say otherwise. Even so, LLMs are genuinely useful, just not nearly as much as the investment would suggest.

toephu2 1y ago

What 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 (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West. And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.

therealpygon 1y ago
What are some examples that might blow my mind?
- augstein 1y ago
  Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network. The latter probably will never happen in the US.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.
    - basisword 1y ago
      I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.

stonemetal12 1y ago

US manufacturing hit an all time high of 2.9 trillion dollars in 2024, and is up year over year. Yeah totally failing.

judahmeek 1y ago
According to Google: "Slower growth: Despite the record output, some analyses reported that the overall growth of U.S. manufacturing output was modest, at just 1% in 2024. This reflected a lag between announced investments and new operational capacity coming online." So record output, but practically zero growth.