Willy Shih on AI and Disruptive Innovation

When you think back to before AI dominated all the conversations that are going on right now, what was the state of manufacturing and supply chains?

Well, I think you raise a very good point because AI really has started dominating conversations with the appearance of these large language models.

You know, ChatGPT in particular, when it came onto the scene, now that's all anybody can talk about.

But actually, if you look back at what was going on in manufacturing, uh, and a lot of the sciences, machine learning applications have been coming along for many years already.

And in fact, I, I would say in a lot of manufacturing systems, particularly in, uh, tech products like circuit board inspection, for example, when I am looking at, uh, solder balls and I wanna see is there a void in there so I don't have a good circuit connection, stuff like that, that's been an application for machine learning.

Uh, that's, that's-- that, that really probably started about 10 years ago, right? So that's been, uh, that, that's been coming for some time.

So before we go too far-

Okay

... help me understand the difference between AI and machine learning.

Well, machine learning is, uh, one technique within AI, okay? Machine learning basically says, uh, "I'm gonna feed the system a lot of data, and I'm gonna try to extract patterns within it." So I, I think it's kind of a, a broader categorization of it, if you will.

So what did the rise of AI change in how you look at competition and disruption in regards to these systems?

I, I, I think what AI is doing is it's enhancing, uh, a lot of the capabilities and processes that we already know in terms of providing better precision or, uh, extending our ability to really digest and leverage huge amounts of data that was ver-very hard to do before.