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Comment by red75prime | Hacker News Reader

Ah, sorry, it's ASML expertise that needs to be cloned and scaled up. I don't see how it changes things, though.

Robots don't need that much intelligence. High-speed joint control, "hand-eye coordination", the higher level tasks can be delegated to external models. Distillation already works quite well for isolating the required functionality.

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I'm pretty sure ASML, and their supply chain, do have plans to increase production, as do the chip fabs - they all see the demand, while at the same time being leary of boom and bust which is the historical reality of the chip business.

But, the production expansion rate of none of these companies is being limited by lack of trained personnel, and if it were it would surely be faster to hire/train more humans since robots are still very far from human dexterity, not to mention intelligence.

Robots and AI are tools of automation, a way to replace humans with machines, but not all the problems in the world are bottle-necked by lack of humans, or the cost of humans.

Investing in training a person gets you one trained person. Investing in training an ML system gets you a cloneable ML system that can be scaled on demand much faster. ROI might change quickly.

Sure, but we're simply not at the point, maybe never will be, where lack of employees is the bottleneck to chip production. A fab takes billions of dollars and multiple years to construct - there are many constraints.

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