AI And The Economy: Manufacturing’s Benefits Are Mostly Outside The Factory
February 8, 2024
Artificial intelligence will help manufacturing by better understanding of demand for products and supply of inputs, with lesser impacts on what happens inside the plant. Robot technology continues to improve, but not at the rapid pace of the large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots such as ChatGPT.
The LLMs have made huge advances in processing words, numbers and images. Although many people hear “artificial intelligence” and think “robots,” don’t expect the LLMs to power robots any time soon. The LLMs gained power when huge quantities of data, scraped from the Internet, were used to train the models. Comparable data have not been assembled for robots, yet. Robotics will continue to improve thanks to better sensors, chips and experience, but not immediately at the rapid pace of LLMs.