Comment by kasey_junk
Comment by kasey_junk 5 hours 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.
> 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.