This is amazing for China, and it is what India should have done for a long time: https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/chinas-new-export-engine-supplying-the-factories-of-the-world-b8f1c176?st=vFVUXK

When I first heard Jeff Bezos was going to make an AI manufacturing firm, I thought it’d be revolutionary. I have a friend who once described the difficulty of moving manufacturing from China to either South America or Southeast Asia, each having their own economic such as supply chains or talent/knowledge/industry expertise and social issues (e.g. Indonesia as a dominant muslim country could have issues with 24/7 monitoring due to the religion’s required prayer time, though this could be lenient. I’m not sure).

What captured my attention about manufacturing was the difficulty of scale up. It’s not just determining the right amount of input and predicting a profitable amount of output to produce, but the actual manufacturing process requires expertise in designing. I thought with LLMs we could see a potential for custom-built machines, lowering the barrier for small business to scale up past the initial prototyping phase. Alas, it’s just a PE rollup.

I have no experience in manufacturing, but the article reminded me of this. I actually have no idea if the design of manufacturing process is actually that difficult. I just remember the talent issue of allocating talent resources/engineers.

For commentary on the actual article, this is no surprise. China is advancing as an economy, and as wages are increasing and talent has built up more and more expertise, I doubt China will be able to hold on to their former ability of producing low-end products, contrary to the notion the CCP has. Though, Xi Jin Ping has already noted his desire for continuing to produce low value products, in the same speech, he also noted that it is inevitable that China will lose its economic ability to continue to do so. It as a society will continue to want more as younger people naturally do not want to work this backbreaking jobs.

It is also a story of why tariffs are used, especially by up-and-coming nations, as a necessity to build up domestic talent that eventually can compete globally. It might also be a good reason why keep certain supply chains for a complex manufacturing ecosystem is important. Without that ecosystem, the country becomes underdeveloped in engineering talent and simply things that get produced making upstream businesses harder to make domestically.