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62 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 One of the latest acronyms to join the pop culture lexicon is artificial intelligence (AI). To many, AI brings the promise of revolution- ary innovation into a near-limitless array of products and applications. To some, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" comes to mind, par ticularly the scene where the ship's computer named HA L 9000 ref uses an order from astronaut Dave to open the pod- bay doors. HAL states, " I ' m s o r r y D a v e , I 'm a f r a i d I c a n' t do that." HAL fol- lowed a long line of Ho l lywo o d inter- pretations of ar tifi- cial intelligence, fre- quently represented by nefarious, overzeal- ous computers. Like the internet itself, artificial intelligence can be har- nessed for good and bad purposes. For this conversation, I'll leave the bad pur- poses in the scripts of Hollywood movies. We've heard the term, but what is artifi- cial intelligence? What are its potential appli- cations within the electronics manufactur- ing industry? How is it being implemented? AI in the Electronics Manufacturing Space I invited Arif Virani, co-founder and COO of DarwinAI, to explain artificial intelligence and its current and potential applications within the electronics manufacturing space. The term "AI" has been exploited by the marketing departments of com- panies from almost every industry around the world. Let's separate the wheat from the chaff. From a 30,000-foot perspec- tive, what is artificial intelligence? You're right, Mike. Artificial intelligence is clearly a buzzword. We think of it as the ability of machines to perform functions and tasks typically associ- ated with humans, usually in a narrow domain. While AI can be applied broadly, the nature of the AI (e.g., expert systems, machine learning, generative AI), and the depth at which it was created, impact its use- fulness. For example, many AI packages are avail- able to build visual inspection tools. However, getting these packages to work well in a pro- The Knowledge Base by Mike Konrad, SMTA