General Science, Lenovo form AI partnership for tire manufacturing

Beijing – China’s General Science and Lenovo Group have signed a strategic cooperation agreement to establish a long-term partnership in smart manufacturing.

The deal, signed 9 Jan, covers digital transformation, green and sustainable development and the application of artificial intelligence in tire production, General Science said in a social media post.

A key focus of the partnership is AI-enabled quality inspection for tire manufacturing.

The agreement follows a joint “all-steel X-ray tire defect detection” project between the two comanies, which applies Lenovo’s Edge Brain “large model + small sample” technology for non-destructive testing.

As part of the project, more than 20 AI models were built and optimised within three weeks, and four rounds of testing have been conducted since June last year, said General Science.

The results, the company said, showed that inspection efficiency, missed-detection rates and false-detection rates “all reached expected targets.”

The system is expected to cut manual inspection costs by more than 60% and reduce missed detections by more than 80%.

“This marks a substantive breakthrough by the two sides in the field of industrial AI quality inspection and sets a new intelligent benchmark for quality control in tire manufacturing,” the release said.

General Shares said the partnership will extend beyond X-ray inspection to cover both internal and external tire inspection.

The goal, it said, is to build “an AI quality inspection system covering key production nodes” and an “intelligent ecosystem spanning the entire industry chain.”

The cooperation builds on General Shares’ broader AI push.

In November last year, the Chinese tire maker launched its “Huiyan AI large model” in collaboration with Tsinghua University, aimed at deepening AI use across the full tire manufacturing process. (ERJ report)

General Science general manager Gu Cui said the Lenovo deal moves the company’s AI strategy into a “new phase”.

The cooperation, Gu said, "marks that the company’s AI capability building is moving from single-point breakthroughs to a new stage of systematic and ecosystem-based development.”

Future cooperation between the two companies will cover smart manufacturing and quality control, digital infrastructure, business intelligence and joint development of industry benchmarks.