Causal AI
What causal AI taught me—even when I stopped believing the hype
I went looking for a machine that could explain cause and effect. What I found was a better discipline for asking industrial questions.
Archive07 essays
Industrial AI · Manufacturing · Leadership
Ideas worth keeping,
revisited with hindsight.
Independent notes shaped by factory work, building IndustrialMind.ai and moving between German, Chinese and global manufacturing cultures.
Complete collection
Essays by Steven Gao
Original publication dates are preserved. Each retained essay has been edited for clarity without changing its central argument.
Founder note
Why I am building AI that understands industry
The factory does not need a more eloquent chatbot. It needs intelligence that respects engineering reality and helps people execute.
Industrial strategy
The industrial internet’s ‘Apple dream’—and what survived
Industrial platforms were supposed to reorganise manufacturing. The vision was early; the implementation logic was incomplete.
German industry
What Formary teaches us about digital reinvention in German industry
A family manufacturer did not begin with a platform strategy. It began with a painful process it understood better than anyone else.
Smart factory
A smart factory needs a navigator, not another technology catalogue
The difficult question is not which technology exists. It is which use case deserves to move first in this factory.
Retrospective
What I thought ChatGPT would mean for manufacturing in May 2023
The early excitement was justified, but the factory value was never going to come from a generic chatbot alone.
Personal
Do the difficult, correct thing
Difficulty alone has no moral value. Meaning comes from choosing work that is hard because the problem genuinely matters.
Speaking · Industrial AI · Thoughtful collaboration