The development trend of artificial intelligence in intelligent manufacturing

Intelligent manufacturing is the deep integration of advanced manufacturing technology and information technology, and is the common enabling technology for the transformation and upgrading of China's traditional industries and the development of strategic emerging industries. Artificial intelligence is an important part of intelligent manufacturing, what will happen to the development of artificial intelligence in intelligent manufacturing?

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a kind of machine intelligence, which is a system or discipline in which machines simulate or simulate human intelligence. The main research content of artificial intelligence includes cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, reasoning and application, machine perception, machine thinking, machine learning, machine behavior and intelligent systems, etc., reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception, movement, operation, etc., these are the basic things to be studied in artificial intelligence.

There are many companies that want to transplant artificial intelligence into the actual production and application of enterprises, and many venture capital funds are also willing to invest in artificial intelligence startups. But these companies want to apply their deep learning capabilities directly to solve real-world problems, rather than improving their deep learning tools, which are often complex and difficult to understand and only a few data scientists can master. It can be seen that the complexity of deep learning will hinder the practical application of artificial intelligence, and the simplification and productization of deep learning platforms are imperative.

The current state of artificial intelligence

Currently, major providers of deep learning such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nvidia, etc., are trying to simplify deep learning tools. But as it stands, finding a data scientist with good qualifications and the ability to simplify work in the first place is not an easy task. Second, using these platforms is often complex and expensive, unless a large number of expensive GPU nodes can be rented, the training time of just one model is measured in weeks, and there are still many models that simply cannot be trained, we know very little about the optimization of hyperparameters, and some have not even been properly identified.

The currently commercialized deep learning-driven AI is actually currently limited to two main areas: text-to-speech processing and image-to-video processing. Both areas are commercially viable, and AI and deep learning are indeed being actively adopted.

Artificial intelligence will continue to emerge primarily in the form of chatbots with natural language processing. In 2015, only 25% of companies had heard of chatbots, and by 2017, a considerable number of companies had planned to make chatbots, and smart speakers represented by Amazon Echo have become a typical example of artificial intelligence entering the consumer field, with sales exceeding 20 million. In the third quarter of 2017, smart speaker shipments skyrocketed by 708%, and the domestic smart speaker melee has also kicked off, with Alibaba and Xiaomi both launching their own smart speaker devices to seize the market at low prices.

Speech recognition will continue to evolve rapidly and will most likely become the user interface of choice in all systems. With the saturation of visual entrances, audio devices will become more and more important information entrances, and voice intelligence based on speech recognition will appear in more smart products, such as speakers, TVs, refrigerators, cars and wearable devices.

Artificial intelligence driving technology

The practical application of deep learning artificial intelligence in image and video recognition is still quite limited, and only facial recognition has a large market prospect. Although self-driving cars are one of the hot areas for artificial intelligence venture capital, and traditional car companies and Internet technology companies are continuing to invest, it is worth paying attention to whether the commercial landing of self-driving cars is aimed at end consumers or freight rental companies, and how big its market prospect is, still needs to be further verified and explored by the market.

Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword

In 2017, China's information industry turned to artificial intelligence, and new Internet information apps, represented by Toutiao, made full use of online tracking and location tracking algorithms of personal devices to push personalized information to users that are more in line with users' tastes. Based on this, these news apps can accurately deliver ads to the target group segmented, which can reduce the advertising cost of merchants and reduce the interference of ineffective ads to readers.

At the same time, the privacy risks posed by artificial intelligence are gradually emerging. Users can close the app or opt out of online tracking, but the app already knows you better than friends, family, or even yourself. Coupled with the proliferation of cameras that track and record facial information, once our facial information is secretly collected and stored in facial recognition databases, combined with our various private data, once the data is used by criminals, the consequences will be unimaginable.

The intelligent manufacturing we want to achieve now is based on artificial intelligence, not just artificial intelligence. The industrial intelligence that has been accumulated for a long time in the industrial field and the artificial intelligence that has originated in the information field need to learn from and integrate each other. Taking these two intelligent technologies as the main body, taking into account other intelligent automation technologies, is the mainstream development direction of intelligent manufacturing technology in the future. Starting from industrial intelligence and gradually integrating artificial intelligence is the road to intelligent manufacturing suitable for Chinese enterprises.