Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Michel Morvan, Co-Founder of Cosmo Tech (Part 2)

Michel Morvan: In general, the human brain is able to do two unique things. The first one is recognition. If I see you in a crowd, I will recognize you. It’s a black box because I’m not able to explain to someone how to recognize you. That’s the first unique ability of human brains. The second one is that we are able to understand what is happening and build things.

These are two very important abilities. We use them together all the time. For example, now you’re listening to me and you recognize the words. This is your recognition ability. You don’t think about recognizing the words. But you do more than that. You understand what I say. You are able to make the link between what I say and what you already know. You’re doing all these things together. This is your intelligence.

An important thing to have in mind is that almost all artificial intelligence today is only based on recognition. Everything you hear about neural network is recognition. Nobody today has the beginning of an idea of how to create a machine that is able to learn how to understand. At the end of the day, we only have half of what we were looking for. We just have recognition. We don’t have intelligence.

The main problem when you want to use these kinds of tools to be able to understand that very complex system and behavior of such a system is that you need understanding. Data is not enough. The fact that data is not enough is something extremely important. I’m going to give you an example of a use case.

Sramana Mitra: I’m very curious how you’re going to go from here and how you deal with that understanding issue. Go ahead and do the use case first.

Michel Morvan: I’m going to give you an example of a use case where our company has deployed an augmented intelligence tool for a very big problem. They solved the problem with a customer and because we are a software vendor, now we are selling the software to other customers. The customer with whom we created the software is managing a high-voltage utility network – high-voltage electric transmission system.

The customer is the company that is managing these high-voltage systems for all of France, which makes them the biggest European player. There are hundreds of thousands of equipment. They’re facing what they call their €1.7 billion pain point. The €1.7 billion corresponds to the money they spend every year for maintenance, renewal, and development of the network.

Every year, they have to maintain it. If you just consider maintenance and renewal, you realize that it costs approximately €100 million every year. The problem they’re facing is that almost all the equipment has been installed 50 years ago. The expected lifetime is approximately 50 years. What does that mean? It means that if they continue using and maintaining that equipment, because everything is going to go down at the same time, it may not be €800 million. The year after, maybe €1.2 billion. Of course, the regulator will not accept their increasing the tariff for customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Michel Morvan, Co-Founder of Cosmo Tech
1 2 3 4 5