Andrew Ng (吳恩達), cofounder of some of Alphabet Inc-owned Google’s most prominent artificial intelligence (AI) projects, on Thursday launched a new venture with iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd (鴻海精密) to bring AI and machine learning onto the factory floor.
Consumers now experience AI mostly through image recognition to help categorize digital photographs and speech recognition that helps power digital voice assistants such as Apple Inc’s Siri or Amazon.com Inc’s Alexa.
However, at a media briefing in San Francisco two days before Ng’s Landing.ai venture was introduced, he demonstrated an example of AI being used for visual inspection in a factory’s quality control efforts.
In many factories, workers look over parts coming off an assembly line for defects.
Ng showed a video in which a worker instead put a circuit board beneath a digital camera connected to a computer, which identified a defect in the part.
While typical computer vision systems might require thousands of sample images to become “trained,” Landing.ai’s system would take only five training images, making it easier to adapt to different tasks in a factory, he said.
Landing.ai has been approached by investors, but has not accepted outside capital, Ng said, adding that Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), is Landing.ai’s first strategic partner.
The start-up has been working with Hon Hai since July, but Ng would not elaborate on the nature of the collaboration or which of the Taiwanese company’s clients it might involve.
Ng said he understands that his firm’s technology is likely to displace factory workers, but Landing.ai is already working on how to train workers for higher-skilled, higher-paying factory work involving computers.
“I would love to help displaced workers gain the skills they need to succeed,” he said.
Ng, a Stanford University professor, cofounded Google Brain in 2011, an effort that strung together thousands of computers that learned to identify objects, such as cats, purely from watching YouTube videos.
Researchers considered it an accomplishment, because the computers had not been “taught” about cats beforehand, but learned on their own through what researchers call deep learning.
Ng in 2014 moved to Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc (百度) to head up its AI research group.
He resigned from Baidu in March.
Ng, who colaunched online learning platform Coursera in 2012, did not announce funding details.
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