النص 🔗
WEBVTT
00:00:01.840 --> 00:00:02.799
Hey everybody.
00:00:03.040 --> 00:00:04.320
Fascinating chat today.
00:00:04.400 --> 00:00:18.160
We're talking about what happens when AI meets the physical world from industrial IoT and edge computing to automation, reliability, robotics, and more with a true industry RD innovator from Jigsaw U.S.
00:00:18.399 --> 00:00:19.839
Anthony, how are you?
00:00:20.399 --> 00:00:21.280
I'm doing well.
00:00:21.440 --> 00:00:22.559
Thanks for having me, Evan.
00:00:22.960 --> 00:00:24.000
Well, thanks for being here.
00:00:24.239 --> 00:00:36.240
Really excited for this chat as someone who's followed the IoT industry for a couple of decades, and it's such an interesting time to look at AIoT, the intersection of IoT and AI.
00:00:36.479 --> 00:00:43.200
Before all that, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role and what you're building at Jigsaw in the U.S.
00:00:43.679 --> 00:00:44.640
Yeah, of course.
00:00:45.119 --> 00:01:03.759
I have been in the industry for roughly 25 years, working on software, and most of my work has been primarily focused on research and development with uh machine intelligence and machine-to-machine communication.
00:01:05.200 --> 00:01:15.840
And now recently I started working as the head of engineering and architecture for Jigsaw US, which has a parent company in Japan.
00:01:16.560 --> 00:01:27.280
A lot of your listeners probably haven't heard of Jigsaw since it's been primarily in Japan, and they're just now reaching out and have made an office here in the United States.
00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:32.239
And yeah, they're going on 25 years this year.
00:01:32.560 --> 00:01:41.280
Um they've always focused on kind of in the IoT and the data operations space.
00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:43.439
Fantastic.
00:01:43.599 --> 00:01:48.719
And I I like this because this isn't a marketing chat, this is uh technology chat.
00:01:48.799 --> 00:01:52.560
So we're gonna get right into your background and what you're building.
00:01:52.640 --> 00:02:04.000
I I noticed you mentioned you're working 35 years in the industry, as as have I, but you've been working with AI for a couple of decades, well before the hype of LLMs and and chats.
00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:11.680
So tell us, you know, you go back to expert systems and algorithm development through machine kind of learning.
00:02:11.840 --> 00:02:16.400
So, in that couple of decades of experience, what really has changed?
00:02:16.639 --> 00:02:18.000
Why all the excitement now?
00:02:18.080 --> 00:02:19.360
And maybe what hasn't changed?
00:02:19.439 --> 00:02:21.039
What are some of the fundamentals?
00:02:21.919 --> 00:02:27.520
Yeah, so back in the day it was kind of a dirty word to actually say AI.
00:02:27.680 --> 00:02:29.599
I mean, that was like sci-fi, right?
00:02:29.680 --> 00:02:35.840
Like even today, it's a it's a lot of people in the industry still avoid the terminology.
00:02:36.080 --> 00:02:56.159
It's a little too broad, nebulous, but we've uh we've always been using some form of machine intelligence for the last several decades to solve problems, especially in the form of uh expert systems, uh, evolutionary and adaptive programming techniques.
00:02:57.840 --> 00:03:15.599
There, I mean, even neural networks that are the foundation of what everything we use today are started, you know, decades ago with convolution networks, with analyzing imagery and and even forms of like graph database intelligence for expert systems.
00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:21.360
Of course, if you used any of the chatbots or natural language tools back in the day, they were incredibly limited.
00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:46.479
And that was that was the first exposure I had with computers that really got me excited, was even when I was a kid and talking to these chatbots that they used to put out for like they had like different experts, like talk to Einstein or talk to a psychiatrist, and you know, they the the fun thing was to find out what their limitations were and then find out how they actually worked.
00:03:46.800 --> 00:04:17.199
But back then it was just a expertism, a database that was just filled with question answers and patterns that might be able to match, which isn't a huge difference to the day, except for that now with the computing power that we have and neural networks have kind of come into their own, we've all moved towards transformer systems and many of the new techniques that that kind of wrap around those, but a lot of the old techniques are are coming back into Vasion or have never really left.
00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:20.240
I mean, even the evolutionary algorithms.
00:04:20.800 --> 00:04:35.600
I we've worked on a few of those and our projects before integrating genetic algorithms with uh modern day LLMs, which have come out to give much more deterministic and interesting answers.
00:04:35.839 --> 00:04:43.360
Even Google just put out what was it, it's called like auto-evolve, I believe, which which is just like that.
00:04:43.439 --> 00:04:49.199
It's it they're just taking the old genetic algorithm kind of thing and matching it up with new transformer models.
00:04:50.240 --> 00:04:55.439
But yeah, the it hasn't changed entirely, and you know, it's exciting.
00:04:55.519 --> 00:04:58.079
We're moving a lot faster than we ever have.
00:04:58.319 --> 00:05:05.120
It's almost hard to keep up with everything, but I read uh more research papers than I've ever done in my life.
00:05:05.360 --> 00:05:12.319
And yeah, you well, I read ChatGPT summaries of those research papers, so that shows you where I am.
00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:14.480
But and also IoT has changed.
00:05:14.560 --> 00:05:25.120
I mean, another technology that's been around for a couple decades and has faced challenges, you know, in terms of integration, fragmentation, and standardization and on and on.
00:05:25.360 --> 00:05:37.360
And uh, we're finally, I think, getting to a place where IoT is bringing real
Load full transcript
value, not just to users and users like myself, but but actual value in the enterprise world.
00:05:37.600 --> 00:05:41.439
And you know, one of those challenges has been integrating integration.
00:05:41.839 --> 00:05:45.680
Can IoT devices with AI begin to integrate themselves?
00:05:45.759 --> 00:05:54.560
And how close are we, do you think, which is you know one of your missions, to eliminate all that kind of manual integration, the stitching together type work?
00:05:55.519 --> 00:05:59.360
Yeah, well, well, surprisingly, we can do a lot today.
00:05:59.839 --> 00:06:03.920
I our focus and our research right now is around a lot of that.
00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:10.879
And the normalization, the parsing, and the decoding being automated, since those have been some of the the hardest problems.
00:06:11.759 --> 00:06:22.000
And normalization and parsing these the LLMs with paired with deterministic algorithms have have shown really great progress.
00:06:22.160 --> 00:06:27.120
They've we've pretty much solved that that case.
00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:46.480
As you know, you know, specialized binaries and formats that some people have still take a human hand, uh especially for for uh for validating the the decoding of different uh formats.
00:06:47.120 --> 00:06:50.399
But most of it can be automated as well.
00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:54.560
You can use very small sample data sets to get a lot of information.
00:06:54.800 --> 00:06:56.800
Same thing with the normalization.
00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:18.000
You can take in a small data set or historical data and just look at and understand the patterns of the data to be able to normalize it, to be able to find out, you know, three different desperate temperature type of readings that they do correlate and how they correlate and how they might uh fit into a similar data set.
00:07:18.240 --> 00:07:23.519
And usually much more accurately than we ever could in the past without these tools.
00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:24.720
Brilliant.
00:07:24.879 --> 00:07:31.360
And just to cut one here, be careful of just touching your table or the mic, it's coming through.
00:07:31.519 --> 00:07:33.040
So it didn't, it didn't.
00:07:33.279 --> 00:07:36.560
I'm just worried if we keep going and it'll be hard to edit out.
00:07:36.720 --> 00:07:42.160
So yeah, I use AirPods, so I don't have to worry about that in my hands.
00:07:42.560 --> 00:07:48.560
I haven't been in I haven't been in this room before, and it's like this really nice physical uh wooden table.
00:07:48.800 --> 00:07:49.680
I keep touching.
00:07:49.920 --> 00:07:52.160
Yeah, I'll back I'll back off from the table.
00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:52.959
That'll be a good idea.
00:07:53.199 --> 00:07:53.759
Okay, okay.
00:07:53.920 --> 00:07:56.000
So I'll I'll go back so to cut one.
00:07:56.240 --> 00:07:57.439
Next question.
00:07:57.839 --> 00:08:06.959
So everyone seems to be bolting these chatbots onto existing platforms as sort of stage one, but you know, that might
be dangerous, right?
00:08:07.120 --> 00:08:11.279
Particularly when you have hallucinations and real-world scenarios.
00:08:11.519 --> 00:08:14.160
Why is that approach perhaps not the best one?
00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:16.160
And what is your alternative?
00:08:17.199 --> 00:08:27.839
Yeah, so the project that we're working on right now, the focus was to architect around these new tools because the fact that they are still brittle.
00:08:27.920 --> 00:08:33.679
I mean, you're talking you're working with non-deterministic systems, in essence, when you work with LLMs.
00:08:34.559 --> 00:08:42.000
And the hallucinations and the errors may never really be solved, especialized for especially for specialized cases.
00:08:42.799 --> 00:09:08.159
Today, we we've done it, we do extensive benchmarking and testing in-house, very rarely rely on the public benchmarking, which I would advise people not to rely on, because of course, companies that make AI models, especially the the state-of-the-art large foundation models, they know about these tests and they do try to work them out and try to perfect them.
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:22.399
But in-house, we've seen error rates and hallucinations out of the box within the IoT space and handling data being 60, 70% hallucination and error rate, which is fairly extreme.
00:09:22.559 --> 00:09:35.519
But once, but if you actually architect around the system, around the data with instructions, sometimes with specialized trained models, you you can get that error rate down to almost zero.
00:09:35.679 --> 00:09:55.360
You can you can get almost as good as the traditional expert systems and and yeah, and that that's kind of the goal for everybody, but you know, that a lot of people want to go into this more generalized space, which is useful because generalizing the models does give them more insight.
00:09:55.519 --> 00:10:07.279
They can solve problems that you wouldn't expect, and the nuance of a user interfacing and how they might go towards a problem set is going to be so different from the next user.
00:10:07.440 --> 00:10:18.240
So having that generalized knowledge in many different fields is useful in that way, but it also contributes to this creativity inside the model, this the hallucination rate.
00:10:18.879 --> 00:10:19.679
Yeah, I got it.
00:10:19.759 --> 00:10:27.200
So give us a bit of a practical example of you know AI configuring or operating an IoT system.
00:10:27.360 --> 00:10:30.879
What would that look like in the field in sort of reality?
00:11:16.529 --> 00:11:19.649
So there are multiple layers to that.
00:11:19.889 --> 00:11:32.129
So one, we talked about data normalization, just the onboarding of devices and integrating them greatly with that because of the nuances and and the variety of the different types of data.
00:11:32.210 --> 00:11:44.370
But there's also the interactivity of how to interpret and create uh complex alert systems, visualizations to understand when a problem happens.
00:11:44.689 --> 00:12:02.610
You can utilize AI systems for many different aspects of that to simplify the process, but also to expedite it, to make it much faster to handle as like say fleets of devices are being monitored at one time.
00:12:02.769 --> 00:12:06.769
People can only handle so much and address so many of those alerts.
00:12:06.850 --> 00:12:08.850
And then sometimes they need to evolve.
00:12:09.009 --> 00:12:37.169
I mean, false alarms is some of the biggest problems we've heard from customers that have hundreds to thousands of devices, is that you know, the these false alarm systems take a lot of manual process for somebody to come in and adjust and say, okay, well, this this anomaly detection is is is has been set or manually designed for a system that's drifted or changed over time that now just does not fit.
00:12:37.490 --> 00:12:48.610
So then an AI can go in and monitor that and give suggestions on it and adjust the parameters based on what a human decides as well.
00:12:48.769 --> 00:13:00.929
So keeping a human in a loop is still very important, but it's more of a back and forth and and more of a assistance than full automation at this point.
00:13:01.809 --> 00:13:02.529
Interesting.
00:13:02.689 --> 00:13:09.169
And you also talk about treating physical sensors and and cloud APIs as equivalent data sources.
00:13:09.330 --> 00:13:17.250
Talk about the source of uh of the data in a in a in a distributed IoT world and and how you make sense of all that.
00:13:18.450 --> 00:13:19.090
Yeah.
00:13:20.370 --> 00:13:27.490
So all the data out there can a lot of times be abstracted as a device as well, right?
00:13:28.129 --> 00:13:58.769
So we've we found that a lot of the problem sets out there, like energy efficiency for a building, might require outside weather information and forecasting or historical data through systems like Energy Star and getting, or even the power station or or or supplier that they're using, the energy rates fluctuate extremely quickly nowadays.
00:13:59.009 --> 00:14:16.529
And tracking all of that internal data and making it perform as a device next to the internal metrics of the building, of the you know, the heating and cooling systems and lighting, you can you can solve the problems much more efficiently that way.
00:14:16.769 --> 00:14:23.889
Because a lot of the a lot of the problem sets require a little bit forward thinking, anyways, to do them efficiently.
00:14:24.529 --> 00:14:37.730
And that's that scales with the size of a factory or building, like how much in the future you you need to help forecast this information, and then how much external data is helpful for a solution.
00:14:38.289 --> 00:14:38.769
Interesting.
00:14:39.009 --> 00:14:45.330
So talk about what which you know of these smaller specialized AI models are you running at the edge?
00:14:45.649 --> 00:14:46.450
Can you talk about that?
00:14:46.529 --> 00:14:47.649
Are you building your own?
00:14:47.809 --> 00:14:54.610
And what you know, when does it make sense versus the big frontier you know uh labs models?
00:14:55.809 --> 00:15:11.409
Yeah, I have I have a lot of experience building out small models, especially in in in high security regions, uh that a lot of customers they're afraid of where their data is going.
00:15:11.570 --> 00:15:39.889
And they, although a lot of these large language models, they have you know SOC2 compliant, uh, and they check all the boxes of not you know using or sharing data, they still feel there's that's not a guarantee because there's been too many reports of data leakage, and as as well as so that's the security is one of the biggest concerns that have pointed me down the road of developing custom small models.
00:15:40.049 --> 00:15:44.129
But the other benefit of that is efficiency sometimes.
00:15:44.289 --> 00:16:10.129
There's a scaling problem where the large models only become a are only affordable when you're within a it was like roughly, I think still today, like a hundred users, and then hosting your own starts to starts to make sense because the the cost for the server and operating it ends up ends up being more economical.
00:16:10.450 --> 00:16:14.049
And those models, you can specialize them even more.
00:16:14.129 --> 00:16:17.649
You can train them directly on your problem and data set.
00:16:18.450 --> 00:16:21.490
So you get a lot of benefits out of that.
00:16:22.769 --> 00:16:42.769
We've I've worked with government and large corporations that they they refuse, of course, to use the big model to use cloud that's outside of the outside of the internet, but they usually have an intranet of things of their own, right?
00:16:42.850 --> 00:16:57.490
They they build out large internal data sets to solve these problems, and they've noticed that they get less errors and hallucinations with these small models when they're trained specifically on their data set and their problem.
00:16:57.970 --> 00:17:05.890
And that's that goes for problems, everything from like image recognition to natural language.
00:17:06.610 --> 00:17:07.250
Interesting.
00:17:07.490 --> 00:17:15.330
And you know, lots of focus on the safety and reliability of the again, the frontier language models now for good reason.
00:17:15.410 --> 00:17:19.650
You you know, you're millions of people using them every day.
00:17:19.730 --> 00:17:22.690
But you know, what about AI safety for these smaller models?
00:17:22.850 --> 00:17:32.130
What's your philosophy there regarding autonomy and you know the deterministic engineering of those when safety and reliability are at play?
00:17:33.650 --> 00:17:35.809
So it takes a lot of testing.
00:17:35.970 --> 00:17:46.370
Um and then picking out models that are open weight are are very helpful because then you can see what the data, what data it was trained on.
00:17:46.610 --> 00:17:51.970
So that gives you a little bit of a picture of what you could expect from these models.
00:17:52.130 --> 00:18:03.090
Of
course, a lot of people are afraid of these of the flood of small models coming out of China that might be government funded or or or even US funded ones.
00:18:03.330 --> 00:18:12.050
But the most of the models can run fairly sandboxed easily, so a lot of that fear can be mitigated.
00:18:12.290 --> 00:18:31.010
But but we we have seen issues where using a model, even an open model, has had some consequences where the model will report or say things that were not expected and were not desirable and have to be trained out of the model or corrected.
00:18:31.570 --> 00:18:35.330
So there are concerns there.
00:18:35.730 --> 00:18:54.050
I know that that there are recent articles and things coming out, like even Anthropic just put out that article that they had a fear that that small models could self-replicate and actually go on to all the IoT devices and become swarms and and all right, it's a very large danger.
00:18:54.130 --> 00:18:58.690
But of course, somebody would have to specially design a model for that.
00:18:58.850 --> 00:19:03.810
Those aren't the kind of models that people pick out and train or or work with in our field.
00:19:04.050 --> 00:19:04.290
Yeah.
00:19:04.450 --> 00:19:08.450
And of course, you know, we have botnets and malware designed every day.
00:19:08.610 --> 00:19:11.490
That's part of what the bad guys, the the black ads, do.
00:19:11.650 --> 00:19:11.810
Yeah.
00:19:12.210 --> 00:19:14.530
So that's uh, you know, a known entity.
00:19:14.770 --> 00:19:15.490
So what what else?
00:19:15.570 --> 00:19:16.290
What have we missed?
00:19:16.370 --> 00:19:20.050
What are some of the big next technical challenges that you're facing, maybe that we haven't talked about?
00:19:20.210 --> 00:19:27.090
What should CTOs be thinking about now or or next, looking into the short-term one or two year future?
00:19:29.090 --> 00:19:34.210
So I believe people are moving a little too slow in a lot of this industry.
00:19:34.450 --> 00:19:35.890
It's it's hard to keep up.
00:19:36.130 --> 00:19:42.370
We've we have people that want to adapt this and want to understand it.
00:19:42.530 --> 00:20:02.050
And a lot of people are focused on the problem set, but we've got tons of these of these technologies coming out and changing so rapidly that it's it's it's a little hard for large industries to move, you know, it's the big ship trying to trying to navigate the waters.
00:20:02.210 --> 00:20:20.930
It's and the big issue right now is it's partially security, but these new technologies have opened up uh a way for people to find vulnerabilities and and and hack systems much more efficiently than they ever had before.
00:20:21.170 --> 00:20:26.450
I mean, I get I get bug reports or security reports in mass daily now.
00:20:26.530 --> 00:20:46.290
Like, and this is this is it's uh it's hard to keep up with, but to have a good policy in place and pretty much using the same tools, using automation to help address those rapidly is is key in the industry, particularly with IoT and factories and and large buildings.
00:20:46.530 --> 00:20:52.930
And we every day there's another report of some legacy system hacked.
00:20:53.010 --> 00:20:57.570
And the funny thing is, is legacy now is months instead of you know years.
00:20:57.810 --> 00:21:00.290
It's like yeah, no, it's moving so quickly.
00:21:00.450 --> 00:21:02.930
And I'm here on the nexto.ai website.
00:21:03.010 --> 00:21:05.410
Your your colleagues, I think, in in Japan.
00:21:05.570 --> 00:21:12.290
I see so many great use cases here from the home to the office, you know, intelligent office, shared office environment.
00:21:12.690 --> 00:21:33.650
Gosh, I wish I had this when I was working in an office, you know, person controlling screens and cameras and room availability all through IoT and of course a production line uh fleet management, you know, trucks across the country allowing for for tracking and planning purposes.
00:21:33.890 --> 00:21:38.610
Are there the any use cases, those, for example, that you're really excited about?
00:21:38.770 --> 00:21:42.530
And and how do you serve up uh those customers on the platform today?
00:21:42.690 --> 00:21:45.250
Maybe talk a little bit about the commercial side.
00:21:46.850 --> 00:21:50.290
So, yeah, we we've been working with multiple use cases.
00:21:50.370 --> 00:21:59.810
Uh the ones like you've discussed, and we've even looked into monitoring systems, cellular monitoring, remote environmental monitoring.
00:22:01.730 --> 00:22:05.410
Really, the the field is is so open right now.
00:22:05.810 --> 00:22:11.570
It can be applied from everything, yeah, from a home to a fleet of trucks and factories around the world.
00:22:11.730 --> 00:22:22.130
And where we used to, I've been on projects that were large multimillion dollar IoT kind of setups for integrating multiple factories.
00:22:22.290 --> 00:22:27.010
And those projects used to take years to get to to plan and to implement.
00:22:27.330 --> 00:22:33.090
And now the planning and implementation are down to can be down to weeks.
00:22:33.250 --> 00:22:40.130
Like I said, a lot of businesses don't want to run that fast or don't know how to, but the software has really enabled that.
00:22:40.450 --> 00:22:42.770
And it's it's this back and forth.
00:22:42.850 --> 00:22:47.970
It's like, like I said, keep the human in the loop, but you don't have to train the human for the specialized job.
00:22:48.130 --> 00:23:07.010
It's like the thing that we that I went through and the whole industry went through with the whole low code became out, it came out to be kind of a false promise where people were like, okay, we're gonna make all these complicated things simplified, but just by adding these options and these good interfaces, right?
00:23:07.170 --> 00:23:14.370
But then what happened was they just kept adding layer and layer and layer to so that they could generalize for those problems.
00:23:14.610 --> 00:23:18.930
And then you ended up just needing another type of specialized engineer to solve that problem.
00:23:19.090 --> 00:23:21.330
I mean, it's like something like ServiceNow.
00:23:21.490 --> 00:23:30.050
And it's like there are those are specialized engineers that actually run those systems, but the promise was that it was a general person and even a manager might be able to use it.
00:23:30.210 --> 00:23:35.010
But now we're actually hitting a point in technology where that is possible.
00:23:35.330 --> 00:23:49.250
The natural language systems can parse people's language so well that if you architect the system to direct their questions and their asks, you can build out almost any complicated system.
00:23:49.810 --> 00:23:50.450
Well, I love that.
00:23:50.690 --> 00:23:52.690
And that's almost a mic drop moment.
00:23:52.770 --> 00:23:57.730
With I think looking at your your your slogan here, AI built in, not bolded on.
00:23:57.810 --> 00:23:59.330
I think that says it all.
00:23:59.490 --> 00:24:04.690
Thanks so much for joining and sharing a little bit a peek behind the curtain and congrats on the mission.
00:24:05.010 --> 00:24:05.970
Yeah, thanks, Evan.
00:24:06.690 --> 00:24:08.770
And thanks everyone for listening and watching.
00:24:09.010 --> 00:24:13.170
Check it out at n equto.ai, snekto.ai.
00:24:13.570 --> 00:24:17.970
And also check out our TV show, Tech Impact on Fox Business and Bloomberg once a month.
00:24:18.050 --> 00:24:18.690
Thanks, everyone.
00:24:18.850 --> 00:24:19.650
Thanks, Anthony.
00:24:20.210 --> 00:24:20.850
Yep, thank you.
00:24:21.810 --> 00:24:22.370
Bye bye.