Comment by Workaccount2
8 hours ago
As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable.
Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit.
People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.
> To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back".
The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
Military and government buy locally produced things, for a good reason. This allows some industries to re-shore.
Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
California Forever is a weird network state I wouldn't wish to be a part of.
I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
> One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.
Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.
I was thinking along the lines of, for example, a mobile phone company that controls the worlds most popular open source smart phone operating system. In theory, since they are guiding the development of the mobile OS, they should be the first to be able to release hardware that takes advantage of the newest versions of the software. They could tailor their hardware to perfectly fit the future of the software.
That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.
This was already reality before LLMs. If you put a successful game on any app store, expect Chinese and Korean clones of it within 2 weeks.
> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
What problem do you think needs fixing?
Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
> Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs.
The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
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There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US.
It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war.
The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
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Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want.
I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
> and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want
Those nations that were close allies of the US before 2025 are watching American society "rug pull" itself straight to hell right now with little to no effort at all from China.
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> Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything.
I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously.
The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete.
Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
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> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it.
Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.
I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry.
The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."
Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
Tariffs only work if you have alternatives you can buy. China is the only reasonable source of procurement on the vast majority of goods in the world.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.