Dear friends,
Today Landing AI, where I am CEO, launched LandingLens, an AI-powered platform that helps manufacturers develop computer vision solutions that can identify defective products. For AI to benefit a wide range of industries, we need platforms that enable experts in a variety of fields to build and deploy models. LandingLens is a step in this direction, and it’s available to manufacturers immediately.
A major challenge to taking advantage of AI throughout the economy is the sheer amount of customization needed. To use computer vision to inspect manufactured goods, we need to train a different model for each product we want to inspect: each smartphone model, each semiconductor chip, each home appliance, and so on. How can Landing AI build models for thousands of products without hiring thousands of machine learning engineers? It’s much better to empower the manufacturers to build and deploy these models themselves.
LandingLens enables experts in manufacturing — rather than experts in machine learning — to collect data, train models, deploy them, and carry out continuous learning. It helps them make sure their models work and scale up deployments. If the test data distribution drifts and the algorithm’s performance suddenly degrades, they’re empowered to collect new data and retrain the model without being beholden to an outside team.
Here are a few unique features of LandingLens:
- Rather than holding the training set fixed and trying to improve the model, we hold the model fixed and help manufacturers improve the training set. We’ve found that this approach leads to faster progress in production settings.
- Rather than focusing on building models that recognize defects better than humans can, our tools aim to improve human-level performance. The better humans can recognize defects, the more consistently they’ll label those defects in training data, and the better the trained models will be. This is a very different philosophy from usual in AI research, where the goal often is to beat human-level performance.
Having led AI teams at large consumer internet companies, I believe it’s time to take AI beyond the technology industry, to all industries. We’ve been building this platform for over a year, and I’m excited to be able to talk about it publicly. I hope that LandingLens — and other verticalized AI development platforms to come — will lower the bar for industrial deep learning and spread the benefits of AI throughout the economy.
Keep learning!
Andrew