Transforming agriculture with AI

irrigation agriculture
Photo: Joseph Fulgham/Pixabay

Untether AI is looking to transform agriculture with edge-optimized solutions that address critical challenges like labour shortages and inefficient resource use.

As AI reshapes the farming practices, Untether AI said it is delivering solutions that improve productivity and sustainability, ensuring the future of agriculture.

Accelerating the future of agriculture

Untether AI is delivering AI acceleration solutions that power advanced vision-based equipment for precision farming. These solutions help with tasks such as crop monitoring, weeding, identifying pests or diseases, automating harvesting processes, and optimizing irrigation. While AI holds enormous potential in agtech, traditional GPU-based solutions are often prohibitively expensive, with high ongoing operational costs. Untether AI’s speedAI240 Slim offers edge-optimized AI acceleration that is both practical and scalable, allowing farmers to embrace the future of farming with efficient, high-performance AI solutions.

“At Untether AI, we believe that AI is not just a technology advancement; it is a force that will redefine the agricultural landscape,” said Chris Walker, CEO of Untether AI.

“Our speedAI family of AI accelerators has the best performance, power and accuracy giving AgTech equipment designers the essential capabilities to maximize farm equipment efficiency and effectiveness; reducing upfront and operational costs, making sustainable practices viable.”

Overcoming limitations

Most agtech solutions rely on GPU-based solutions – originally designed for gaming—which are costly, inefficient, and power-hungry—making them impractical for real-world agriculture. For example, laser weeders intended to replace harmful chemicals are expensive due to the need for multiple GPUs, pushing farmers back to chemical solutions. Untether AI’s speedAI240 Slim AI accelerator card employs a novel At-Memory compute architecture, which the company said delivers superior performance and low latency at a fraction of the cost and energy, making AI-powered agtech viable and efficient.

Just as the automotive industry embraced centralized architectures for efficiency, agriculture is now poised to shift away from complex, inefficient GPU-powered distributed systems toward more streamlined centralized solutions. Untether AI is using an open-source platform that leverages a centralized architecture to enhance reliability, reduce costs, and simplify maintenance. By moving away from power hungry, expensive GPU-centric models, Untether AI’s accelerators enabled advanced AI capabilities, driving both productivity and sustainability in agricultural operations.

Energy efficiency

The key to advancing AI in agriculture lies in vision-based precision and faster decision-making with high accuracy. Untether AI’s speedAI240 Slim empowers farmers with AI capabilities to streamline operations, such as weeding, by identifying smaller weeds more efficiently and conserving resources. Its 2000 tera operations per second (TOPs) performance, combined with a 75-watt power consumption, reduces system costs and complexity by replacing multiple GPUs with a single device, enhancing overall reliability.

With the recent publication of MLPerf Inference v4.1 benchmarks, Untether AI said it has demonstrated a six-times improvement in energy efficiency and three-times lower latency.

“Untether AI’s speedAI240 Slim AI Inference accelerator card brings the power of data center performance to edge and near-edge applications, making it a great fit for our edge server product family,” said Andrew Woollard, CTO of J-Squared Technologies, an Untether AI partner.

“We look forward to exploiting the advancements in high-speed data bandwidth and higher TOPs performance-per-watt as we continue to build state-of-the-art systems and support next-gen AI applications.”

Vision for sustainable agriculture

Untether AI envisions AI as a driving force for sustainable farming, tackling challenges like labour shortages and resource inefficiencies. By delivering edge-optimized AI solutions, Untether AI said it is unlocking productivity while promoting sustainability.

This translates to more efficient farming, reduced chemical use, healthier crops, and ultimately, a more profitable and sustainable future for farmers.

+ posts

Jim Cornall is editor of Future Food Today and publisher at Ayr Coastal Media. He is an award-winning writer, editor, photographer, broadcaster, designer and author. Contact Jim here.