When asked about the rate of progress in artificial intelligence (AI) adoption for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, Greg Mark is not holding back.
“The crazy thing about 3D printing is the hardware is usually pretty good. The difficulty that we had as an industry was teaching people what you could print,” Mark told TCT during a conversation about his new company Backflip AI. “There's this major problem that companies are like, ‘Hey we've got half a million parts, but we don't know which ones can be 3D printed, and we can't sort through half a million’. You can do that with AI and we will. It's not surprising that it hasn't happened before because a lot of the most powerful AI training techniques and infrastructure are new within the last couple years. Markforged had the best software team in the 3D printing industry when I was there five years ago, and even then, we were limited in what we could do with AI compared with today. So, additive is only just getting started with AI."
