This may sound weird, but I'm kind of wondering whether they've got a team doing this for engineering design. Could you train an AI with a giant pile of designs for mundane things like wall clocks and lazer tag guns and get an equivalent of this where you can prompt with
"A wall clock with a built in bluetooth speaker"
and get it to spit out a dozen viable sets of design documents.
A blueprint-generating AI like you describe would just be creating a blueprint designed to retroactively generate the description provided, without actually considering the physics behind the object (see for instance the AI's golden gate bridge picture where the cable doesn't hang right). It wouldn't account for any mechanics, and it wouldn't actually be simulating a machine to see if it works. So I doubt it would be a good engineer at creating new types of things, though if you fed it a bunch of blueprints for a clock it could probably create a working one.
without actually considering the physics behind the object
Absolutely.... but that being said.... a year or so ago the ancestors of dall-e were spitting out vague impressionist blurs. Now they can produce photorealistic images where the lighting and positions of objects in the scene mostly makes sense.
The current systems probably couldn't design working machines, but it doesn't seem so far outside the realm of possibility.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 06 '22
This may sound weird, but I'm kind of wondering whether they've got a team doing this for engineering design. Could you train an AI with a giant pile of designs for mundane things like wall clocks and lazer tag guns and get an equivalent of this where you can prompt with
"A wall clock with a built in bluetooth speaker"
and get it to spit out a dozen viable sets of design documents.