I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash.
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.
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.
Heavy machinery is starting to. Computer vision for robots is a big deal, and takes quite a bit of processing power. Robotic mining, earthmoving, and even construction equipment is exactly where Germany will innovate. Not to mention drones - Rheinmetall needs DRAM...
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.
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.
Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
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").
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).
They can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)
Sex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.
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?
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.
I understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point.
Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?
It doesn't need to be at a consumer price point first, it needs to replace a human at an existing warehouse or manufacturing role first, and that's achievable in the next two years at this point.
When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer to fold laundry, you're just going to buy a second DLC for your existing robot. And it needs to get between those places, so if you have stairs, wheels don't cut it. You need a bipedal robot very quickly.
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.
Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 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.
South Korea is facing a serious demographic crisis, in the not too distant future it'll be a country of mostly elderly folk. I'd be interested to know if this investment has anything to do with this, since robots may be needed in the absence of young able bodied folk.
It's crazy how much 1at could improve QOL for their citizens and also improve and diversify their economy. Alas, they're just going to subsidize ram prices for everyone when this current cycles goes from boom to bust.
Since this money belongs to Samsung and Hynix, it cannot be used for charitable activities. However, it is much better to build new cities, semiconductor factories, and power plants than to pay dividends to shareholders. The construction industry is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the economy.
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 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!
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda
Infineon still exists as a semiconductor manufacturer. Their stock has gone crazy since start of the year as well.
Even better, Qimonda was ultimately bought (alongside all their patents) by SMIC [1] who is now the Chinese memory player. For 30 million.
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
Wow, 7000 patents and all their IP and documentation
> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?
My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn
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.
The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.
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.
Most of those now need memory to function. At some point it becomes a national security issue.
That's not really a gotcha, because my train doesn't need a TB of dram.
Heavy machinery is starting to. Computer vision for robots is a big deal, and takes quite a bit of processing power. Robotic mining, earthmoving, and even construction equipment is exactly where Germany will innovate. Not to mention drones - Rheinmetall needs DRAM...
Siemens?
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.
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.
Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
> “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.
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").
Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
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).
Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?
automating repetitive physical work doesn’t appeal to you?
They can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)
[delayed]
Sex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.
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?
Because you can use existing physical equipment with automation, until it’s ready for a full replacement
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.
I understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point.
Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?
It doesn't need to be at a consumer price point first, it needs to replace a human at an existing warehouse or manufacturing role first, and that's achievable in the next two years at this point.
When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer to fold laundry, you're just going to buy a second DLC for your existing robot. And it needs to get between those places, so if you have stairs, wheels don't cut it. You need a bipedal robot very quickly.
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.
Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 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.
A lot of training data being collected is coming from people. You have companies paying people to do chores while recording themselves.
Because it's what Elon and China say that matters. There are exceptions but Korea is not the land of creativity. At all.
South Korea is facing a serious demographic crisis, in the not too distant future it'll be a country of mostly elderly folk. I'd be interested to know if this investment has anything to do with this, since robots may be needed in the absence of young able bodied folk.
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
It's crazy how much 1at could improve QOL for their citizens and also improve and diversify their economy. Alas, they're just going to subsidize ram prices for everyone when this current cycles goes from boom to bust.
Since this money belongs to Samsung and Hynix, it cannot be used for charitable activities. However, it is much better to build new cities, semiconductor factories, and power plants than to pay dividends to shareholders. The construction industry is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the economy.
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
> 1.5tr parameter models
Curious, what's this based off of?