AI is teamwork

Last week, I visited a customer interested to learn more about artificial intelligence and its application in pick-and-place robots. After a quick personal introduction, I started to share some of my learnings while working for more than four years in the field of applying deep learning to high-tech systems. Somewhat proudly I explained that almost all deep-learning algorithms out there are available as open-source implementations. This means, I said, that anybody with some Python programming experience can download deep-learning models from the internet and start training. My customer promptly asked: “If everything is open and accessible to any artificial-intelligence company, how do they differentiate between themselves?”

The question took me a bit off-guard. After a short hesitation, I replied: “In the same way that a hammer and a spade are tools that are available to everybody, not everybody can make beautiful things with them. Data and algorithms are the tools of an AI engineer. Artificial-intelligence companies can set themselves apart with their experience and knowledge of applying these tools to solve engineering problems.” While my answer kept the conversation going well at that time, I needed to reflect on it later.