Commercializing the first direct-diode laser bright enough to cut and weld metal

This is huge, it means that laser cutters will be even cheaper than they are now, and that much more ubiquitous. Laser cutters are already making their way into small scale shops and hackerspaces, this'll just hasten that. But it also has a ton of applications elsewhere. Likely it will lower the cost and increase access to the minimum set of machine tools necessary to sustain a developed economy, which has implications for the entirety of the developing world as well as further afield in things like Mars colonization.

Additionally, it makes things such as low-footprint or modular factories, configurable/programmable or wholly automated factories, and self-replicating factories more of a possibility in the near future.

Looks like multi-core asynchronous with load balancer wins even in the laser world.

Cool, but I wouldn't call it a single diode LASER since it is forming an incoherent beam from several diodes. Now if you could get a single, coherent beam at several kW, that would be really cool.

So now we only need better batteries, and we'll soon be able to cut and weld metal with our phone?? :D

I wonder what these kinds of huge gains in laser technology might mean for fusion and beamed energy rocket propulsion?

This seems a quite dangerous toy to me... a portable laser strong enough to cut through metal.