Alphabet's Intrinsic Partners with Foxconn to Deploy AI-Powered Robots in U.S. Manufacturing

Intrinsic, an Alphabet company, and Nvidia supplier Foxconn will join forces to deploy AI robots in the latter's U.S. factories | Fortune

Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturing partner of companies like Apple and Nvidia, and Intrinsic, an AI and robotics company under the Alphabet umbrella, are investing in a joint venture that will deploy robots in Foxconn's U.S. factories, according to a statement from Intrinsic released Thursday evening. "Foxconn just has huge manufacturing expertise," Wendy Tan White, CEO of Intrinsic, said to Fortune in an interview. She added that Foxconn, perhaps best known for its work assembling Apple's iPhones, will know which parts of the manufacturing process can be best improved through AI. Intrinsic is a graduate of Alphabet's moonshot program, focused on developing breakthrough new technologies. Developers worked on ways to make industrial robots easier and cheaper to use; Alphabet debuted the firm as a separate company in 2021. In particular, Intrinsic focuses on flexible manufacturing, or developing automated systems that can respond to new data, self-optimize, and adapt how they work. Currently, industrial robots are best applied to predetermined tasks, and it is difficult -- and expensive -- to change how they work. That's why human labor, for many situations, is still a better option for manufacturers that need flexibility. White says that Intrinsic and Foxconn had been in conversations for "maybe a year or two now," and that it was "inevitable" that the electronics manufacturing would want to cooperate with Intrinsic on software and AI development. "In working with Intrinsic, we are able to tap their deep expertise in AI-driven robotics," Foxconn chair Young Liu said in a statement. "This synergy complements our global manufacturing leadership, enabling us to collaboratively unlock the factory of the future." In late October, Foxconn, whose official name is Hon Hai Technology Group, announced that it would deploy robots at its new Houston, Texas plant producing Nvidia server racks. Foxconn is also working with Nvidia to create medical robots for Taiwan's hospitals. The Taiwanese company is also cooperating with robotics firms from mainland China. In January, a Foxconn executive announced that the company would deploy robots from Shenzhen-based UBTech in its factories in mainland China. White declined to share how much money Intrinsic or Foxconn was contributing to the JV, but did share that the initiative was "not a pilot." Initiatives like Intrinsic's new JV are part of a growing shift in attention to "physical AI," or AI models applied in the real world as opposed to the purely digital world of software. White suggested that some of the interest in robotics is the result of COVID-era supply shocks, and companies' recognition that they needed to onshore more manufacturing. Yet the loss of manufacturing expertise in advanced economies has meant that factories can't easily scale up production. Robotics could help solve the problem of a shrinking manufacturing workforce-in more ways than one. "What's interesting and heartening is that suppliers within manufacturing supply chains, like machine shops, are finding that bringing AI and robotics back into the conversation is bringing the young back into those industries too," White suggested. Asia, due to its combination of technical expertise and manufacturing footprint, is taking the lead on industrial robotics. Other companies are paying attention to this region; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has touted South Korea as a future hub for this new technology. "Korea can create the robots, which then work in factories to create more robots, which work in more factories," Huang told reporters in late October, right after the U.S. chipmaker announced that it would ship tens of thousands of GPUs to Korean companies like Hyundai and Samsung. Yet the biggest player in this space is China, which makes more than half of the world's industrial robots. Firms like Hangzhou-based Unitree are now rapidly developing new humanoid robots. "They've got the skills and expertise, because they've been producing for so long," White said. "I wouldn't ignore it."

Alphabet's Intrinsic and Foxconn plan to accelerate factory automation with smarter robots - SiliconANGLE

Alphabet's Intrinsic and Foxconn plan to accelerate factory automation with smarter robots Alphabet Inc.'s robotics unit Intrinsic Innovation LLC said today it's working with the manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn, to explore possibilities for the mass deployment of robots on its assembly lines. The two companies have just created a multiphased joint venture that aims to design and develop a new generation of more intelligent and flexible robots that can perform more complex tasks in the manufacturing industry - including many that can presently be done only by humans. Intrinsic is a robotics software developer owned by Google LLC's parent company that was launched in 2021. Its goal is to unlock the potential of robotics for millions of businesses by making the technology more cost-effective and flexible. To do that, it's developing software that allows robots to be programmed and adapted to perform more intelligent tasks than are currently possible. The company sees AI as the enabler of this vision, and to that end it has created a number of advanced models that can act as the "brains" of robots, allowing them to "see" their surroundings, identify objects and obstacles, estimate distances and so on, so they can work flexibly and safely in physical environments. A key aim of Intrinsic is to make robots easy to deploy and operate, so that they can be used by businesses that lack the technical expertise to program them. It's also exploring the idea of a "robotics-as-a-service" model, which will allow companies without significant financial resources to utilize robots. Manufacturing is an obvious target for more intelligent robots. While many manufacturing operations are already heavily automated, the industry is still reliant on significant manual production processes for more complex tasks. In addition, the robotics systems in use today tend to be extremely rigid, hard-coded to perform very specific tasks. This means robots generally only perform predictable, predetermined and high-volume tasks, and lack the ability to handle process variability or optimize processes based on real time data and feedback. Because of this, manufacturers are often slow to respond to shifts in demand or supply chain constraints, Foxconn said. The joint venture aims to change this, and it will do so by combining Intrinsic's artificial intelligence capabilities with Foxconn's "Smart Manufacturing" platform, the companies said. To begin with, they'll focus on designing and building more adaptive and reusable robotics systems with AI-enabled intelligence, so they can start automating more complex tasks. A key element of this collaboration will be Intrinsic Flowstate, a web-based development platform for building and deploying advanced robotics software, and the Intrinsic Vision Model, which allows robots to understand the world visually. Ultimately, the partners want to develop and test robotics systems for a wide variety of manufacturing tasks, spanning assembly, inspection, machine tending and logistics, so they can bring automation to operations once considered too complex for anything but humans. Intrinsic Chief Executive Wendy Tan White said Foxconn will help her company bring the value of AI to the physical world. "By marrying Intrinsic's expertise in AI-driven robotics software with Foxconn's deep expertise, we will accelerate the adoption of AI where it is most needed and valuable today," she promised.