Dive Brief:
- Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer known for producing Apple products, announced the launch of its own artificial intelligence large language model on Monday.
- Developed in-house in four weeks, the "FoxBrain" LLM was designed to support a variety of manufacturing-related functions, including data analysis, decision support, document collaboration, mathematics, reasoning and problem solving and code generation.
- The manufacturer plans to open the model to the public in the future as an open source product, though Foxconn did not include a release date.
Dive Insight:
LLMs offer significant potential for use in manufacturing across a variety of functions, serving as a "gateway between humans and machines," according to the World Economic Forum.
The models can assist workers in making informed decisions by analyzing large amounts of production data, helping boost efficiency and cut costs.
Foxconn's foray into AI models comes as manufacturers seek more powerful LLMs that can respond to prompts pertaining to specific production challenges and industry sectors.
The LLM outperformed other traditional Chinese language models, as well as Meta's current comparable models, according to the company. The manufacturer noted, however, that DeepSeek's much-talked about AI model still outperformed FoxBrain.
"This large language model research demonstrates that Taiwan's technology talent can compete with international counterparts in the AI model field," the company stated in a press release.
Foxconn collaborated with AI giant Nvidia on the project, working with the latter for technical support and model pre-training and using the chipmaker’s H100 GPUs to power its training process. The companies have previously worked together on other AI-driven endeavors, including electric vehicles and smart factories.
The company plans to use FoxBrain to power three platforms – smart manufacturing, smart EVs and smart cities.
