Manufacturing is a uniquely good training ground for physical intelligence. Manufacturing is rare among real-world domains in that it is complex, physical, and yet fully specified.
A manufacturing model must represent latent physical state and process dynamics,not just imitate what an expert typed or clicked.
Instrumented, closed system
- Manufacturing has complete specifications and hard constraints.
- Processes can be instrumented for rich, objective data collection.
- The environment is closed-loop and finite: every action is testable against ground truth.
01Expertise must be modeled, not observed
- Manufacturing processes are dominated by latent variables that sensors don't directly expose.
- Experts function as adaptive controllers, continuously inferring hidden state and adjusting actions under uncertainty.
- What appears as 'heuristics' is actually long-horizon belief-state tracking shaped by sparse, delayed physical feedback.
02High-stakes validation
- Manufacturing does not tolerate incorrect internal state.
- Incorrect beliefs surface as measurable defects.
- Only policies with accurate latent-state representations survive.
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