PI and AI

For those of our listeners who do not know if that is possible at all, please tell us what is the PI System?

[chuckles] Well, yeah, you gotta have a little fun with these things, you know?

Okay.

So okay, yeah, the PI System for I guess those that are uninitiated, um, I, I like to tell people it runs the world in the background because its install base is all of the foundational industries that make modern life possible.

So you think of power generation, transmission and distribution, so it monitors the large majority of the power grid in the US and, uh, and many places around the world.

Manufacturing of course, pharmaceuticals and, um, really, yeah, just all these different industries.

It started as, well, I don't know how d- how far back to go, but essentially it can collect real-time data from just about any industrial source and it speaks all your, your typical and atypical protocols.

So the ones you're probably familiar with are OPC and Modbus and DNP3, and it takes all these and it puts it in a, uh, central, uh, central archive.

Uh, so you know, the term people often use is a historian.

It has a lot of baggage associated with it now, kind of seems, uh, out of date.

But it is, uh, the mechanism by which you bring in all this disparate data, bring it into one common, uh, place that you can then start making use of it.

There's more layers on, on top of it, but, um, at least that's, that's maybe we can start with that.

Yeah, sure.

And we're gonna come to the details a lit- a little bit further on.

Very good.

David, you've been sharing your knowledge, your experience, uh, through videos on LinkedIn, meanwhile understand on your website as well, and I suggested we make them available to a, a bigger audience by talking about the concepts of some of them here in our industrial podcast.

So just let me start.

It's not about just copying one by word.

You know, you've chosen, you decided for your videos specific themes, and it, it's really those themes that, that appeal to me and I'm sure will appeal to our audience as well.

So that's how we're just gonna be chatting about those topics.

Me starting with, I think it was one of the final ones you did so far.

No, that's not true.

One of, um, in, from April actually here.

And actually as it is, you know, if in the meantime there have been updates, you share those as well.

So you talk about, uh, querying the PI System with local LLMs in which you show two alternatives to send your operational data, uh, off to Anthropic and OpenAI.