OpenSSA – “Small Specialist Models” for Industrial AI

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

OpenSSA (pronounced open-ess-ess-em) is an open-source framework for Small Specialist Models (SSAs), which are key to enhancing trust, reliability, and safety in Industrial-AI applications. Harnessing the power of domain expertise, SSAs operate either alone or in "teams". They collaborate with other SSAs, planners, and sensors/actuators to deliver real-world problem-solving capabilities.

Unlike Large Language Models (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.

A prime deployment scenario for SSAs is within the aiCALM (Collaborative Augmented Large Models) architecture. aiCALM represents a cohesive assembly of AI components tailored for sophisticated problem-solving capabilities. Within this framework, SSAs work with General Management Models (GMMs) and other components to solve complex, domain-specific, and industrial problems.

Why SSA?

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  

  .. 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.

What OpenSSA Offers

OpenSSA fills this gap directly, with the following benefits to the community, developers, and businesses:

• 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.

• 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.

• Easy Knowledge Capture: OpenSSA has easy-to-use tools for capturing domain knowledge in diverse forms: books, operaring manuals, databases, knowledge graphs, text files, and code.

• Powerful Operations on Captured Knowledge: OpenSSA enables both knowledge query and inferencing/predictive capabilities based on the domain-specific knowledge.

• Collaborative Problem-Solving: SSAs are designed to work in problem-solving "teams". Multi-SSA collaboration is a first-class design feature, not an afterthought.

• Reliable Domain Expertise: Each SSA has expertise in a particular field or equipment, offering precise and specialized knowledge, thereby enhancing trustworthiness, reliability, and safety for Industrial-AI applications. With self-reasoning, causal reasoning, and retrieval-based knowledge, SSAs provide a trustable source of domain expertise.

• 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.

• Composable Expertise: SSAs are fully composable, making it easy to combine domain expertise.

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 models 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 models.

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

SSA Architecture

At a high level, SSAs comprise a front-end Small Language Model (SLM), an adapter layer in the middle, and a wide range of back-end domain-knowledge sources. The SLM itself is a small, efficient, language model, which may be domain-specific or not, and may have been distilled from a larger model. Thus, domain knowledge may come from either, or both, the SLM and the backends.

The above diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of an SSA, which comprises three main components:

1. Small Language Model (SLM): This forms the communication frontend of an SSA.

2. Adapters (e.g., LlamaIndex): These provide the interface between the SLM and the domain-knowledge backends.

3. Domain-Knowledge Backends: These include text files, documents, PDFs, databases, code, knowledge graphs, models, other SSAs, etc.

SSAs communicate in both unstructured (natural language) and structured APIs, catering to a variety of real-world industrial systems.

The composable nature of SSAs allows for easy combination of domain-knowledge sources from multiple models.

Getting Started

See our Getting Started Guide for more information.

Roadmap

• Play with SSAs in a hosted SSA sandbox, uploading your own domain knowledge

• Create SSAs in your own development environment, and integrate SSAs into your own AI apps

• Capture domain knowledge in various forms into your SSAs

• Train SLMs via distillation of LLMs, teacher/student approaches, etc.

• Apply SSAs in collaborative problem-solving AI systems

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.