However, there are a ton of diverse manufacturing processes, many of which don’t have good simulation solutions.
I’m interested to know which processes these are, what general categories they fall into and why we don’t have simulations for them? Is the bottleneck physics, computation, economics…?
I just asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to explain how to tie shoelaces to someone who has never done that before, a task probably works in its favor because it is so common, plenty of descriptions exist and most people can perform it with little cognitive effort within few seconds every day. It took about 1.5 letter-sized pages of text and still missed a little bit of detail but I think a humanoid robot could follow it and get to the right result. I imagine many tasks of machinists and craftsmen are more complex but simply don’t exist in writing, so I agree that lack of data is the obvious problem. (Cooking would be another field where AI models today may perform above their baseline.)
Also, professions like law and obviously math and software have invented their own languages that only vaguely resemble everyday-language. If we had the goal of capturing the tacit knowledge of craftsmen, like this last surviving stucco worker, we would probably also first invent a more precise language to do that.