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Japanese Company Turns To Google To Help Keep Their Baby Food Safe

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Ensuring food safety is especially critical when it comes to the youngest among us, and one company has turned to artificial intelligence as the first line of defense for baby food.

Five tons and thousands of different types of raw ingredients are inspected every day for the kid cuisine made by Kewpie.

It's a necessary process, but it's made it tough for the Japanese manufacturer, famous for its mayonnaise, to keep up with demand.

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So they turned to Google software called TensorFlow, which trained computers to detect anomalies in diced potatoes and kick off the conveyor belt anything defective.

Their test had near-perfect accuracy at high speeds.

Kewpie notes the goal of this artificial intelligence is to supplement, not supplant its human workers: THEY still ensure nothing slips through the cracks as the food is processed faster.

The idea is to expand the system to check more ingredients, for use with adult food, and to offer it to other manufacturers.

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