Industry revolution?

“Artificial intelligence is technology like electricity”

At Fronius in Thalheim - a partner company of "Streaming AI" - artificial intelligence has already been in use for several years.

(Bild: Markus Wenzel)

Electrification revolutionized industry just as much as the use of computers did later. According to researchers, artificial intelligence (AI) has a similarly groundbreaking potential - and Upper Austria wants to play a pioneering role here. A research project is now set to bring AI into companies.

AI systems such as ChatGPT access vast amounts of data on powerful servers. AI applications in industry are also based on huge, centralized training data sets and require a lot of computing power and energy. According to researchers, this causes massive greenhouse emissions and therefore has a significant impact on the environment.

Large CO2 footprint
University Professor Alois Ferscha, Head of the Institute for Pervasive Computing at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, illustrates: 20,000 requests to applications such as ChatGPT would cause the same CO2 footprint as a car journey from Vienna to Linz.

Resource-saving use in industry
But since AI is here to stay, Ferscha and his fellow professor at the JKU, AI pioneer Sepp Hochreiter, have set out to make the technology more efficient and environmentally friendly. Together with the state's own research center Pro2Future, the "Streaming AI" (Artificial Intelligence) project was launched for this purpose. It aims to make the use of AI in industry more resource-efficient, according to the project presentation on Monday.

Until now, artificial intelligence has been very data and resource intensive. We believe that we need a networked learning, resource-saving AI that runs on the device.

Alois Ferscha, Leiter Institut für Pervasive Computing an der JKU

Like learning to speak
Instead of AI learning from extremely large amounts of data, AI models will in future be used directly on devices and systems in everyday industrial applications. Embedded in the devices, the AI will be trained in real operation. It is like learning to speak, explains Ferscha: a small child is not presented with the entire vocabulary of a language in order to learn from it, but develops its own language system based on experience.  

Model companies as partners 
"It's nonsense to shovel huge amounts of data back and forth," explains Hochreiter. Instead, the essential data should be processed at the end devices - such as at the technology company Fronius from Thalheim, one of the partners of "Streaming AI". One of the aims of the project is to develop a system that automatically detects faulty welded joints using data analysis. In the field of solar energy, Fronius is working on automated software error detection on inverters.

There is no need to be afraid of AI, says Hochreiter: "It is a technology like electricity or computers." Christian Wassermayr from Fronius confirms: "We have been using AI for a long time. It hasn't destroyed jobs, it has created them."

The province of Upper Austria is funding the project with 750,000 euros. AI is a "growth engine" and promotes competitiveness, says Markus Achleitner (ÖVP), Upper Austrian Economic Councillor: "It's not a question of whether we use it, but how we use it."