GFT, NVIDIA Collaborate on AI-Based Manufacturing Apps
GFT will leverage NVIDIA AI and Omniverse tools to create visual and quality inspection applications for manufacturing.
November 21, 2024
GFT Technologies is working with NVIDIA to bring advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to the manufacturing and financial sectors. The collaboration combines GFT’s expertise in digital transformation with NVIDIA’s AI software tools and accelerated computing platform for generative AI to drive a new level of innovation and efficiency in both industries, the company said.
GFT will use the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform – including NVIDIA NIM microservices, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, NVIDIA NeMo, and NIM Agent Blueprints – and the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to develop tailor-made AI applications, focusing on the manufacturing and financial services sectors.
In the manufacturing space, applications will include digital twin technology and visual inspection tools to enhance quality control and operational efficiency.
“We are collaborating with NVIDIA to help unlock the next level of AI-driven solutions for our clients,” said Marco Santos, Co-CEO of GFT. “These tools will drive efficiency and, beyond that, create fresh growth opportunities for our clients. Through this collaboration, we aim to set new standards in digital innovation.”
The partnership will leverage open-source models including Google Gemma, Llama 3.1 405B, and Microsoft Phi. By leveraging these models, GFT will support enterprises in building new AI applications while also giving companies the flexibility to quickly launch new capabilities in any environment they choose – in the cloud or on-premises.
Ignasi Barri, Global Head for Data and AI at GFT, said, “Through this collaboration with NVIDIA, we’re providing our clients with advanced AI capabilities. By combining their advanced technology in hardware and software with our data and AI expertise, we're delivering solutions that can drive real business value.”
According to Barri, GFT has been working with NVIDIA on its AI initiatives since 2014, because AI workloads require the computational resources available in its GPUs. As the company works with a variety of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Azure, the NVIDIA GPUs allow them to be cloud-agnostic.
“You can develop components that are reusable across customers and use cases, so when you invest in building an application like visual inspection or quality inspection, we have the flexibility to use that application across all hyperscalers,” Barri says. In addition, NVIDIA also has a competitive edge in on-premises high performance computing (HPC) clusters.
Barri also said that the NVIDIA Replicator platform for generating synthetic simulation data within Omniverse can help in these inspection/quality applications by virtually training the solution using 3D models. This alleviates the need to disrupt production for physical testing.
“The promise that we are offering the market is that instead of investing weeks or months in managing this data in the acquisition stage, we can do this pre-work offline,” Barri says. “We don’t have to be in the factory. We can use Replicator to train the model, then go to the factory, set up the hardware with sensors, and test the model.”
For manufacturing clients, GFT has been building these applications to help reduce defects in production facilities. Their applications can evaluate the causes of defects and potentially help develop solutions. “Once you have that data, you can be more ambitious and move into anomaly detection or predictive maintenance for machines,” he says. “You can aggregate data from different plans and gain a more descriptive view of the entire process. There are other applications as well, like training new operators to perform a process, and using generative AI to build a chat interface so they can ask questions.”
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Brian AlbrightBrian Albright is the editorial director of Digital Engineering. Contact him at de-editors@digitaleng.news.
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