Rendered at 00:05:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
yalogin 2 minutes ago [-]
Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?
whatever1 39 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash.
I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
woadwarrior01 49 seconds ago [-]
The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.
cherryteastain 17 minutes ago [-]
They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.
Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.
Chip fab locations have traditionally had more political than economic importance. Matrix multiplication chips and RAM have been the recent exception, while TSMC has long been the geopolitical exception. ASML's location only matters to the extent that it gets ordered not to sell to someone.
fennecbutt 4 minutes ago [-]
Memory has only really recently become lucrative. Germany still has heavy machinery, trains, drilling machines etc all of which will be needed for a long time regardless of whether the "bubble pops" or not.
tw04 1 minutes ago [-]
Most of those now need memory to function. At some point it becomes a national security issue.
paulmist 16 minutes ago [-]
IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.
24 minutes ago [-]
zuzululu 24 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
GuB-42 15 minutes ago [-]
The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together.
Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.
12 minutes ago [-]
paulmist 42 minutes ago [-]
> “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward.”
Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.
summerlight 28 minutes ago [-]
Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
winstonlee 34 minutes ago [-]
It's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry.
For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").
jazzyjackson 30 minutes ago [-]
The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says …
the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).
38 minutes ago [-]
dolebirchwood 19 minutes ago [-]
Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?
redorb 13 minutes ago [-]
There are just a few reasons - humanoid make sense, mostly for multi purpose tasks - where if you want a robot to be multi-job, do almost everything a human can do at work --
If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright.
There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.
Retric 14 minutes ago [-]
Human spaces are built for humans. Outdoors cars and quad coppers are a great form but constrained by stars, doors, and low ceiling makes them a poor fit.
Put another way 2 foot tall and 10 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.
password54321 10 minutes ago [-]
A lot of training data being collected is coming from people. You have companies paying people to do chores while recording themselves.
goretghh 10 minutes ago [-]
Because it's what Elon and China say that matters. There are exceptions but Korea is not the land of creativity. At all.
yieldcrv 39 minutes ago [-]
Better spend it now, people won’t need greater than 1.5tr parameter models
and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects
the glut will be enormous
yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it
I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.
Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.
For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").
the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).
If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright.
There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.
Put another way 2 foot tall and 10 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.
and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects
the glut will be enormous
yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it
Curious, what's this based off of?