Siemens wants to improve its position in the field of industrial AI with an alliance from the European mechanical engineering industry.
Europe may be left behind when it comes to general artificial intelligence, but its chances are better when it comes to AI for industry - Siemens wants to improve its chances with an alliance.
In the race for the industrial AI of the future, Siemens has brought in allies from the European mechanical engineering sector. In addition to the Munich-based company, the newly founded data alliance also includes machine tool manufacturers Grob, Trumpf, Chiron, Renishaw, Heller, the machine tool laboratory at RWTH Aachen University and the Voith Group, as Siemens announced. The core of the collaboration is the exchange of anonymized machine data.
The basic idea behind the collaboration is that the higher the quality and quantity of the data used to train artificial intelligence, the better it is. Siemens sees this as an opportunity for European companies. After all, while the continent currently seems to be lagging behind the USA or China in terms of traditional AI, it is well positioned here.
"Together with customers and partners, we are now taking a significant step towards scaling industrial AI," says Siemens CEO Roland Busch. "I see a great opportunity here for Europe's economy with its strong industrial base," explains the manager. "By making our companies' unique wealth of data available for generative AI models, we can achieve completely new levels of productivity." In the long term, the data alliance wants to establish an open standard for the exchange of machine data.
Reliability is the key requirement
An important difference to well-known general AI models such as ChatGPT is that industrial AI must be much more reliable because errors could quickly have expensive or dangerous consequences. One way to achieve this is to train it with reliable data from industry. "Access to high-quality machine data from different manufacturers is key," said Busch. "With this alliance, we can develop AI systems that understand the complexity of development and production, making them a powerful partner for specialists."
Siemens sees the creation of programs for machines as an application example - with their help, progress can be made faster, error rates can be reduced and programmers can be relieved of basic tasks. Other areas include predictive maintenance with machine-specific forecasts, manufacturing processes that adapt to changing conditions in real time and improved energy efficiency.
https://www.heise.de/news/Siemens-startet-Allianz-fuer-industrielle-KI-10667250.html