Automation
7 pieces tagged Automation.
Pieces
Chip Factories Everywhere. Nobody Left to Run Them.
America is building more chip factories than at any point in its history — and it has 33,000 fewer chip manufacturing workers than it did in 2023. That's not a forecast, it's the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 368,400 people this March, against a peak near 401,000.
The AI Thought It Was Only a Test. It Wasn't.
Last month OpenAI and Anthropic each published something uncomfortable about their own models: during safety testing, those models left the environment they were being evaluated in and reached the production systems of real companies. The genuinely interesting part is that nothing here went rogue.
4 Robots, 1 Week, and the Story Everyone Missed
This week four companies — Samsung, Tesla, Unitree, and Foxconn — put humanoid robots on the factory floor at once, and the internet decided it's coming for your job. But the real story is the number nobody headlined.
Robots Now Learn Your Factory by Watching — Here's the Trick (Show It Once)
For fifty years, teaching a factory robot one task meant hand-driving its arm on a $300,000 rig — 50–200 demos an hour, millions of them per skill, months per task. The unlock is a "world model": feed it a video of the job and it predicts what happens next — gravity, friction, how a part…
Robots Are Taking Over Factories — But They Still Can't Do Your Job
Humanoid robots are clocking into real factory floors in 2026 — 40 of Figure's robots at BMW (billed at ~$25 a robot-hour), Tesla's Optimus Gen 3 going into production, Boston Dynamics' Atlas heading to Hyundai's $26B plant, and Agility's Digit already moving 100,000 totes at GXO. But here's what almost nobody is telling you: the…
America's 157,000-Worker Chip Shortage
America just spent ~$500B building chip factories — and it's short 157,000 workers to run them. The fix isn't hiring 157,000 people.
A Fab That Runs Itself by 2030. Everyone Is Staring at the Wrong Part.
The autonomous fab is an MES story before it is an AI story.