[baron816]

IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom. Maybe a million token budget is too small, but something like "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously".

[knollimar]

They can't even run a vending machine. I don't want to do a shallow dismissal, but I think there's a gulf between my understanding and yours. I hope it's me so I learn something.

I think LLMs will be excellent glue of "find the right function/button and run/push it" but design without constraints and they just explode immediately

[lelanthran]

> IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom.

Why do you say this? I have some experience of manufacturing processes and am not seeing where AI would be useful other than to drive the robots which we can already do quite well without AI (see all the dark/lights-out factories that already exist).

Where do you see it being useful? An example would be nice.

[hgoel]

I think embodied AI or autonomous experimentation will need to make a lot more progress before that kind of thing is possible.

Asking AI to design real world objects doesn't work very well because all of its tests involve proxies and thus miss things that are glaringly obvious when the object is actually built.

[bagels]

You think the bottleneck in creating a sneaker factory is not having an LLM to tell you what machines to buy?

[aabhay]

Yes but the second order effect of this is that the cost of the tooling goes up since it is now the bottleneck, and therefore the shoemakers that survive do it off of technical complexity, branding, and regulatory capture.

[billyp-rva]

> "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously"

We already have sneaker designs and the equipment to manufacture them. Whatever it spits out is going to be, at best, a mediocre clone of something that already exists. What exactly is the point?

[baron816]

Sneaker manufacturing is a very manual process. Nike famously tried to automate it and failed (https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/why-its-so-difficult-for-r...). Designing and constantly changing all the processes is more expensive than just having people do it by hand. If you can have AI design the process, then the equation switches.

[Invictus0]

Gotta love when a techbro just says some complete nonsense like this with total confidence

[etdznots]

Grok build me a spaceship to mars, make no mistakes