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.
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.
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.
Merkeln decided what Germany needed more was mass migrants to come and see the peak of its creation much like UK and France who were all competing for hubris over who could produce new citizens to replace its own
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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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-...
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.
Merkeln decided what Germany needed more was mass migrants to come and see the peak of its creation much like UK and France who were all competing for hubris over who could produce new citizens to replace its own
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?
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.
> “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.
Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
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).
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?