Comment by red75prime
7 hours ago
For example, TSMC uses behavioral cloning to scale up human-bottlenecked parts of the manufacturing process to meet the growing demand, while automated research laboratories do thousands experiments in parallel to find better manufacturing processes.
The production bottleneck in a fab isn't the human workers - the process is mostly automated. The bottleneck more derives from how many wafers per hour you can process, which comes down to the etching process and EUV throughput.
ASMLs EUV machines are literally the most complex machine that mankind has ever built, which is why no other country, including the US, has yet been able to duplicate it. It's not just the machine itself, but a global supply chain of irreplaceable components such as focusing mirrors made by Zeiss to an incomprehensible level of accuracy - differences in surface height no more than the size of a hydrogen atom (or if you scaled the mirror up to the size of the country of Germany, then surface differences in height of 0.1mm).
Robots are useful to automate things, but they are zero help when trying to build tech like this that you are incapable of building in the first place.
The US has fallen way behind in manufacturing expertise, and no swarm of robots is going to help.
You've missed a part where it's TSMC that does behavioral cloning (to build more EUV machines). The full vertical integration is a bit farther down the line.
Etching a model's weights on silicon is another way to utilize non-top-notch tech-processes, while maintaining or improving performance. (and it suits robotics well)
TSMC doesn't know how to build EUV machines - they are stuck buying them from ASML like everyone else.
Putting a model's weights in read-only memory close to the processor is certainly a way to increase token/sec generation speed, but of course does nothing to increase intelligence. Robots aren't going to help though - semiconductor manufacturing is semiconductor manufacturing regardless of whether you are etching GPUs or memory on your wafers.