OpenSSA – “Small Specialist Agents” for Industrial AI

  See full documentation at aitomatic.github.io/openssa.  

OpenSSA is an open-source framework for Small Specialist Agents (SSAs), problem-solving AI agents for industrial applications. Harnessing the power of human domain expertise, SSAs operate either alone or in collaborative "teams", and can integrate with both informational and operational sensors/actuators to deliver real-world industrial AI solutions.

SSAs are light-weight, domain-focused and incorporate reasoning and planning capabilities. These characteristics make them ideal for complex hierarchical tasks typically found in industrial applications.

Small Size, Specific-Domain Specialization

The trend towards specialization in AI models is a clear trajectory seen by many in the field.

  Specialization is crucial for quality .. not general purpose Al models – Eric Schmidt, Schmidt Foundation  

  .. small models .. for a specific task that are good – Matei Zaharia, Databricks  

  .. small agents working together .. specific and best in their tasks – Harrison Chase, Langchain  

  .. realize that smaller, cheaper, more specialized models make more sense for 99% of AI use-cases .. – Clem Delangue, Hugging Face  

  .. small but highly capable expert models – Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI  

  .. small models are .. a massive paradigm shift .. about deploying AI models at scale – Rob Toews, Radical Ventures  

As predicted by Eric Schmidt and others, we will see “a rich ecosystem to emerge [of] high-value, specialized AI systems.” SSAs are the central part in the architecture of these systems.

System-1 & System-2 Intelligence

In addition to information-retrieval and inferencing ("System-1 intelligence") capabilities, SSAs are additionally designed with hierachical reasoning and planning ("System-2 intelligence") capabilities. They can execute tasks following general-purpose problem-solving paradigms (such as OODA) and domain-specific expert heuristics, in order to solve a diverse variery of problems that are hard for System-1-only Large Language Models (LLMs) and traditional AI models.

SSA vs LLM

Unlike LLMs, which are computationally intensive and generalized, SSAs are lean, efficient, and designed specifically for individual domains. This focus makes them an optimal choice for businesses, SMEs, researchers, and developers seeking specialized and robust AI solutions for industrial applications.

• Fast, Cost-Effective & Easy to Use: SSAs are 100-1000x faster and more efficient than LLMs, making them accessible and cost-effective particularly for industrial usage where time and resources are critical factors.

• Industrial Focus: SSAs are developed with a specific emphasis on industrial applications, addressing the unique requirements of trustworthiness, safety, reliability, and scalability inherent to this sector.

• System-1 AND System-2 Capabilities, not just System-1: On top of System-1 capabilities such as knowledge query and inferencing/prediction, SSAs have hierarchical problem-solving capabilities based on the domain-specific knowledge and expert heuristics.

• Vendor Independence: OpenSSA allows everyone to build, train, and deploy their own domain-expert AI models, offering freedom from vendor lock-in and security concerns.

Target Audience

Our primary audience includes:

• Businesses and SMEs wishing to leverage AI in their specific industrial context without relying on extensive computational resources or large vendor solutions.

• AI researchers and developers keen on creating more efficient, robust, and domain-specific AI agents for industrial applications.

• Open-source contributors believing in democratizing industrial AI and eager to contribute to a community-driven project focused on building and sharing specialized AI agents.

• Industries with specific domain problems that can be tackled more effectively by a specialist AI agent, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of AI solutions in an industrial setting.

SSA Architecture

Getting Started

See our Getting Started Guide for more information.

Roadmap

Community

Join our vibrant community of AI enthusiasts, researchers, developers, and businesses who are democratizing industrial AI through SSAs. Participate in the discussions, share your ideas, or ask for help on our Community Discussions.

Contribute

OpenSSA is a community-driven initiative, and we warmly welcome contributions. Whether it's enhancing existing models, creating new SSAs for different industrial domains, or improving our documentation, every contribution counts. See our Contribution Guide for more details.

License

OpenSSA is released under the Apache 2.0 License.