What’s at stake:
New U.S. fabs will generate tens of thousands of jobs. The outsourcing of chip manufacturing and the decline in engineering graduates mean many can’t be filled by qualified candidates. Proponents of the virtual factory scheme claim they can attract newcomers to the profession by training them on extended-reality tools.
By Junko Yoshida
What’s at stake?
The novelty of AR and/or VR goggles tempts corporations to embrace the technology to bolster worker productivity. What many companies overlook is that short-term productivity gains achieved through technology may come at the cost of workers’ long-term ability to innovate.
Surely, technology can improve worker efficiency in manufacturing – it always has. This truism helps explain why so many corporations are eyeing the new tools of augmented reality and virtual reality (AR and VR) as the next big thing to streamline and improve their production lines. But equally significant is the impact of a given technology on human behavior.
Read More »Revealing AR’s Unintended Consequences on the Factory Floor
The ground-breaking ceremony near Columbus includes an impressive guest list.
California Bill Targets Tesla
One might say it’s about time to tie Tesla’s hands.
Read More »What Caught Our Eye This Week
What’s at stake:
Safety on public roads grows more tenuous. Tesla’s fraud isn’t just promoting its vehicles as self-driving when they are not. More problematic is that Tesla builds shoddy SAE Level 4 cars equipped with beta software, leading customers to believe they can drive Teslas anywhere. California legislators missed the big picture, a critic argues.
What’s at stake:
For the world’s largest CPU vendor to become a genuine facilitator for the open source RISC-V community, Intel must demonstrate its intent and commitment. Is its Pathfinder initiative for RISC-V enough? Can Intel gain the trust from those in the RISC-V ecosystem? At stake is the future of Intel Foundry Services.
What’s at stake:
Backers of proposed bipartisan legislation to create a Committee on National Critical Capabilities have failed to win over Congress thus far. But the latest version of the “reverse CFIUS” bill stands a better chance of passage, with implications for U.S. tech concerns looking to invest in China.
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Intel needs far more money than it can generate from operations or receive from governments to fund its massive fab construction program. A partnership with investor Brookfield may help ease the pains.
What’s at stake?
Armed with its own unique at-memory compute architecture, Untether AI wants to lead the general-purpose AI inference accelerator market. Can the startup unseat leading CPU and GPU vendors that dominate the AI training sector and are extending their reach into AI inference? Is the knock-your-socks-off performance enough to pull that off?
