AI and sensors: Why not pay some attention to sensors in the fierce competition in AI industry?
People’s interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI ) are on the rise in recent years. Since 2011, companies developing and commercializing AI-related products and technologies have received venture capital totaling more than $2 billion and tech giants have invested billions of dollars to buy AI start-ups. It's been widely reported that computers are smarter than people and may threaten the survival of the human beings.
But on the other hand, we should note that AI is still in its infancy. Though a lot of enterprises are booming, we should pay attention to an issue that has been overlooked: these booming enterprises are concentrated in a few areas. AI as a whole really needs a lot of elements to support its development. The development of many of these elements is still very weak, for example, sensors.
In fact, many applications of AI rely on right sensors. Compared to the rapid development of some hot fields, sensors indeed attract little attention.
Little attention doesn't mean little importance
If the development of AI is divided into technology and application, the application part would be fintech, artificial intelligence security, unmanned driving and other fields, while the technology part would be divided into three parts: data computing capacity, solutions, and hardware.
While data computing involves a wide variety of data, algorithms, computing capacity and platforms; solutions include biological recognition, computer vision, NLP, and so on, and hardware includes the two simplest elements: chips and sensors.
Of course, the hardware we discuss here does not include all manner of robots and intelligent devices, but necessities for providing intelligence for the devices. Chips are equal to the brain, sensors are more like sense organs, which are both necessary for artificial intelligence to connect with everything.
Compared with early industrial sensors, sensors in the field of artificial intelligence have undergone many changes: such as adaptation to computing ability and algorithms, comprehensive recognition of multiple perceptual data, and the ability to transfer. With the advent of AI, everyone knows that chips needed to be replaced, so does sensors. The replacement of sensors is an inevitable trend in AI industry around the world.
However, compared with the research and attention on GPU and other chips adapted to artificial intelligence, it is obvious that the attention to sensors is relatively not enough. insufficient. Areas like machine vision, which often attract hundreds of millions of dollars for reflated companies, companies in sensor area obviously do not enjoy such good luck.
Indeed, the entry threshold for AI hardware is higher than that of others.The demand for sensors in AI industry is changing rapidly, and many traditional advantages of international manufacturers cannot be given full play.
In short, everyone's starting point is the same, the market is relatively fair.
Applications in Automatic driving and Internet of things
The future of AI sensors, to a large extent, lies in the integration of sensors with other fields. Sensors’ importance will be revealed as time goes by.
Perhaps the most immediate value of sensors comes from automatic driving. In the field of sensors, in addition to the laser sensors launched by giants such as Google, it is the sensor hardware launched by old-brand auto parts manufacturers such as Bosch that is suitable for autonomous driving solutions like ADAS.
The core of automatic driving is to make cars interact with traffic environment to the neglect of human senses. This relies heavily on radar, visual cameras and a wide variety of sensor devices. And contrary to common sense, the sensors the self-driving industry seeks today are not the perfect state of sensing and computing capacity. On the contrary, it pursues cost-effective sensors that match vehicles.
Google's driverless car scheme is good, but the cost is way too high. Many people in this industry believe that in the future, sensors will be combined with vehicle's central computing system to solve traffic problems in automatic driving and driveless car. Only with low price, can the autonomous driving be commercialized successfully.
Autonomous driving is a feast for self-owned brand for cars, and the feast begins with sensors.
Another big market for sensor is the fast-spreading Internet of things. Biological recognition, automated production and smart home all need the help of new type of sensors. And with the diversified development of the Internet of things system, more and more sensors will be applied. The expansion of this demand will also give sensing hardware an opportunity to develop.
To be honest, the reason companies regarding AI hardware -- in this case, the supporting components -- have grown at such a slower pace than those regarding AI speech and machine vision in large part because there are so few relative stories to be told.
It may sound like nonsense, but the capital markets we are in are characterized by a love of storytelling, inspiring imagination and increasing valuation at all costs.
Less-attractive hardware doesn’t have many advantages in these areas, but the good thing is that sensor system is with some advantages.For example, here I have come up with some stories to be told about sensors in the future.
1. Data gatherer: We know that AI warfare is largely about data.In addition to allowing machines to sense the outside world, sensors also collect data. Highlighting the value of sensor data and the possibility of reusing those data.
2. The combination with unmanned economy: By this day ans age, when unmanned economy is in full swing, sensors, as the main equipment for the interaction between the Internet of things and human beings, may also be on the rise. The update and innovation in sensors provide solutions for unmanned economy and biological recognition in a variety of scenarios.The most popular thing in the Internet of things is ubiquitous scenarios, which are what AI sensors good at for.
3. As an interface between technology and application scenarios: Of course, the best stories come from logical reasoning. Take automatic driving for example, vehicles themselves need sensors as the interaction between technology and hardware to solve the core problems faced by human beings.This logic is common to many possible intelligent devices.On the one hand, there are technical solutions such as recognition, judgment and inference, and on the other, there are various external data, in which sensors have a large role to play.
To be honest, it's hard to say whether sensors are a good business. The rapid transformation of technical threshold and market demand makes this field full of uncertainty. The purpose of this article is more to remind you of some of the less popular but important areas necessary for AI. AI is a large industry, there is great room for profits as long as you occupy any one of the related area.
There's no need to look for the future in a crowded place.