ComputEx Foxconn Chairman Young Liu predicted that the combination of generative AI and robotics will destroy low-end manufacturing jobs, calling for people to recognize the inevitable geopolitical changes that follow world leaders.
Liu gave a keynote speech at the Computex Conference in Taiwan on Tuesday, advancing the theory that rich countries are doing two things to keep the costs of their products low.
The chairman of the contract manufacturing giant sees limitations on these trends. “In the end, you'll run out of low-GDP countries,” immigration becomes a political issue.
“Generated AI and robotics fill in the blanks,” he said. “That's the opportunity I see when the country thrives more. Low-GDP work is done by Genai and Robotics.”
“I think that's a real challenge for all developed countries,” Li added. “We urge leaders of developed countries to look at this very carefully.”
If these leaders are listening, he tells them that Foxconn is evidence of AI-induced changes. This turns out that after applying the generation AI to its own operation, it works only with software, allowing it to do 80% of the work required to set up the equipment on a new production run. AI struggles to finish work without human assistance, but the combination of bots and brains makes it faster to finish work than working with wetwear alone.
Liu also said that the generation AI is helping Foxconn solve production problems more quickly.
“We thought we could replace all humans,” admitted Liu. “We realised that we couldn't do it right away.” However, Foxconn saved enough time to allow the human expert to focus on the rich issues, a result that the chairman likes, as he finds it difficult to hire skilled and experienced staff and tackle valuable tasks.
“Foxbrain”
Therefore, Foxconn is investing in more AI to strengthen its factory. Liu revealed that the company is creating its own manufacturing-centric model called “Foxbrain.” This creates what we have described as an “agent workflow for highly domain-specific applications” by blending the models of Meta 3 and 4 with data drawn from its own operations.
The manufacturing giant, officially named Hon Hai Technology Group, intends to make the model open source. It is also intended to deploy models across all factories and provide data on its performance so that Foxconn headquarters can constantly refine AI.
Liu also revealed that Foxconn will use AI to design the factory by employing Nvidia's Omniverse tools to create digital twins. The AI then effectively manipulates the digital twin and creates proposals for optimizations that will later be modeled on the digital twin. Once Foxconn feels that this process has produced an optimized design, they start building it in the real world.
Foxconn can already use robots to build robots.
EV Platform Rotation
Liu also mentioned plans for Foxconn to enter the automotive market with its reference design for electric vehicles.
He told the Computex crowd that Foxconn uses this approach when working with PC vendors.
“A good reference design saves a lot of time and improves the time of the customer's market and costs,” he said, citing an 80% reduction in the work required to create a new model. “Looking forward to the announcement of this new EV,” he said. ®
