Robam Appliances released the AI cooking model "God of Food": it is incumbent and meaningful to cook well

Author | "Caijing" new media Su Su edited | Wang Jingya

The "God of Food" is here, he is not Peng Zu and Yi Yin in mythological stories, nor is he the actor Stephen Chow in the movie, but the first cooking model released by Robam Appliances. The emergence of the "God of Food" has made it easy to create personalized cooking for thousands of people. It is reported that the "God of Food" will start the internal test in October this year and be launched in December.

When is the oil hot, when is the green onion and ginger added, and when is the juice collected...... There is no need for human thinking, a complete cooking curve with the assistance of intelligence, semi-automatically emerges step by step a recipe that has been set. This is the innovative move of Robam Appliances to combine the big data and technical algorithms that have been accumulated for many years, and the "return to the future" of the cooking industry has become a reality.

It is an incredible thing for a traditional kitchenware company to integrate software into the content ecology, mobilize hardware to make exquisite dishes, meet the tastes of different people, and create thousands of solutions in cooking scenes. There is no doubt that the advent of the God of Food cooking model is subverting people's perception of traditional cooking.

So why did Robam choose a difficult but correct path? What challenges did they face in the creation of the culinary model? How will cooking anxiety be solved through AI models in the future? In this regard, Ye Danpeng, CMO of Robam Appliances, had an in-depth dialogue with the author.

Get cooking right

"In fact, the boss appliances have been gone for so many years, almost half a century, if an enterprise is compared to a person, it has entered the year of confusion. At this age, what should be understood more is what should be done? The same is true for an enterprise, knowing what you are suitable for, what you are capable of, and which direction you should take root. Ye Danpeng said.

In his opinion, in the era when slow is fast, what can be sure is to do a good job of cooking well. Because the high-speed food processing industry is feeding humans at a faster rate, the chaining of some restaurants has made many traditional cooking techniques insignificant. Under the impact of external factors, cooking seems to become dispensable, people do not have much time to devote to cooking, and the significance of cooking is underestimated.

However, cooking has evolved over thousands of years to the present day, and its value is not only simple filling the stomach and household chores, but also creative work with unique attributes, which is essential to meet the needs of health and nutrition. So how to adapt to the development needs of the current society puts forward higher requirements for enterprises.

Based on this thinking, ROBAM has built the company's strategy and sustainable development in the broad track of the cooking track. Create a belief in cooking from the inside out, and hope that every employee has a heartfelt love for cooking. Therefore, as early as a few years ago, the employees of Robam Appliances had to take the chef certificate to work.

However, faith alone is not enough, action is the power to change everything. Ye Danpeng believes that the change of consumer trends has increased the demand for personalized products, and consumers hope to meet the needs of different use scenarios through a product, and hope that this product has a humanistic color to provide more emotional value. However, all traditional hardware products, since the factory, their functions and interaction with users have been fixed, to solve this problem, only through software empowerment, through the further blessing of AI large models, it is possible to meet the cooking needs of thousands of people.

In fact, there are not many products that have loaded large models in China, and although there are not a few products that have been loaded with large models related to cooking and eating abroad, they are more limited to the level of data feedback and lack sufficient humanistic and emotional experience.

Therefore, when building the basic architecture of the cooking model, Robam Appliances hopes to provide users with more fluent natural language interaction; On the other hand, I hope that it is a loyal assistant who understands Chinese cooking better and can provide proactive and personalized service. Through the popularization of digital cooking technology, we will finally provide personalized and tailor-made cooking solutions for every person and family," said Ye Danpeng.

In Ye Danpeng's view, Robam firmly believes that doing a good job in cooking is a meaningful and unhesitating thing. Because the creativity brought by cooking is different, it will bring cooking to people in a new way, so that more people can reap the joy of cooking.

Create a large model of thousands of people and thousands of faces

Participate in a banquet and suddenly eat a delicious dish, as long as you take a picture and upload it to the "God of Food" cooking model, AI technology can identify the raw materials and cooking steps of the dish, and even restore it to the device to copy the same dish.

In fact, cooking is all-encompassing, it not only satisfies people's basic needs for survival, but also is an emotional expression and philosophy of life. While food provides energy to people, it also brings emotional value and is closely linked to people's fond memories. However, everyone's demands for cooking are different, and some people are obsessed with health and choose a diet that controls sugar and salt; Some people are obsessed with creativity and want to find the creative spirit in cooking......

"When it comes to cooking, many people think of it as having fun. But cooking is an ability, and those who don't have it due to the obstacles of reality will not be able to realize their vision of cooking. Ye Danpeng said, "If the matching recipes are recommended to users based on the different needs of each person, and then made them with the assistance of intelligent hardware, in this process, people will not only gain health and convenience, but also gain an experience that exceeds expectations." ”

Although in the era of AI, the use of technology can not only effectively shorten the cooking time and improve efficiency, but also help beginners to easily get started and meet the possibility of individual needs of family members, cooking is a non-standard operation. At the same time, there are many steps involved in each step before, during, and after cooking, and these steps are interrelated. In addition, a good dish must have both color and flavor, so it also includes various experiences of sight, taste, hearing, and smell, involving thermodynamics, botany, pharmacy, health, nutrition, and many other disciplines. These undoubtedly increase the difficulty of the research and development of large models of cooking verticals.

Then, for the design of cooking large models, algorithms, computing power, data, and applications are indispensable, especially high-quality data, which is one of the core elements of training large models. When creating a large vertical model with thousands of people and thousands of faces, Robam Appliances used three important data capabilities.

"A very smooth experience requires a series of tools, and only when hardware, software, content, and ecology are connected will it generate value." Ye Danpeng said that the training of the cooking vertical model involves three kinds of data: general, vertical and personalized.

In his opinion, general data can be obtained through cooperation, and vertical data has a natural advantage for Robam Appliances. In the past 40 years of development, ROBAM has accumulated a large number of internal literature and research, as well as a large number of external research institution data. In addition to the basic data, the large model itself is open source, and more and more users will participate after the internal test, which will generate a large amount of personalized data and make the large model smarter and smarter.

Based on the application of various capabilities, the God of Food model can perceive the user's role, identity, emotion, and action by observing temperature, time, light, sound, and smell, match the user's personalized data with the large model data, and plan a suitable overall cooking solution for each user, not only telling the user how to cook, but also mobilizing all equipment to collaborate with the cook to make the dish.

Ye Danpeng believes that the large model is not to replace people to cook, but to assist people to make the cooking process simpler. The values determined by Robam Appliances determine the original intention of building a large model, that is, let people always be the protagonist of the kitchen, and no matter how mature the technology is, it must retain people's sense of participation and creativity, so that people can enjoy the joy of creation.

Returning to the future is both a challenge and an opportunity

When it comes to technology, people will think of the future, but why does Robam Appliances talk more about leading people to the future instead of leading people to the future, but returning to the future?

Ye Danpeng believes that cooking is a human talent, and people's instinct is to return to the basics, in a sense, "returning" is to regain the original state of life, and the meaning of cooking is to travel through cycles, without the concept of time and space. And the "future" is to use new tools to improve the efficiency of "cooking". In his opinion, there is too much room for imagination in the cooking empowered by large models in the future, because the logic of human-computer interaction will change from voice and vision to multimodal interaction.

However, the realization of these ideas in the traditional culinary industry is fraught with challenges and no results in the short term. At the beginning, when Robam interviewed software engineers, they didn't know what standards to use. Those who understand algorithms don't know how to cook, and those who know cooking don't understand algorithms. In the past three years, they have made a lot of investments, from the technology research institute, to the technology laboratory, many engineers have put in a lot of hard work in it, but many people inside do not know that there is such a department.

"So how to solve it? It is to exchange time for learning, we introduce a variety of learning methods internally, to embrace more advanced ideas and things, and continue to bring in excellent talents to meet the challenges brought by transformation. At present, the proportion of software engineers in Robam has increased from less than 5% to 26% at present. Ye Danpeng said.

With a talent base, it is logical to develop a large culinary model. From the current point of view, the cooking model first uses the nutrition scene, by collecting and tracking the user's health nutrition status and dietary preferences, it can quickly help him generate a recipe suitable for him, and send the recipe to an open flame or electrified equipment, and the scene of "one-click cooking" can be realized.

The second is the matching scene, in the future, Robam Appliances will cooperate with ecological partners, and people no longer need to blindly buy ingredients when buying ingredients, but use recipes as a unit to purchase corresponding ingredients; Finally, there is the cooking skill improvement scenario, where Robam Appliances and the cooking school are docked, which is equivalent to providing an online course that allows users to learn home cooking step by step, and with the help of AI, they can fully experience the happiness brought by cooking.

At present, the scenarios mentioned by Ye Danpeng include both those that have been realized and those who imagine the future, but no matter which one they are, it is not easy for hardware manufacturers to transform into software. For the future, it is more about building an ecological platform that partners in the entire industry chain can access and make cooking excellent.

In the eyes of the outside world, it is both an opportunity and a challenge for Robam Appliances, which positions itself as a full-link overall solution provider for cooking and determines the development path of "technology + humanities", to enter the cooking vertical large-scale model track.

As Ye Danpeng said: "Nothing is simple, we must not only get back the original beautiful things, but also innovate to face the current pressure, but also to look forward to the future and weave future dreams." Many times, you will find that there are many things that do not see results in the short term, and these are precisely related to the future. ”