Can LLMs really change Mechanical Engineering? AI for Product Design – Hype vs. Reality
Can LLMs really change Mechanical Engineering? AI for Product Design – Hype vs. Reality
Can LLMs really change Mechanical Engineering? AI for Product Design – Hype vs. Reality
Dr. Maor Farid, Co-Founder & CEO at Leo AI
AI is transforming how professionals work by automating expert-level tasks. Developers use Cursor to write and refactor code its company is now valued at $9.9B. Designers turn to Runway and Midjourney to generate visuals instantly. Marketers rely on Jasper AI for fast, high-quality copy, reaching $100M+ ARR. Even lawyers now use Harvey AI to draft contracts.
Most of these tools have a very clear common denominator they are wrappers over ChatGPT. What does that mean? That Cursor, Perplexity, Jasper, and Harvey haven’t developed a new AI model (“AI brain”) but simply wrapped it with a nice interface, added a new logo, branding, and packaged it better for their customers. I’m not trying to diminish their exceptional value to developers, content creators, and lawyers, but that’s the truth they are using existing large language models (LLMs).
This comes with significant advantages use a powerful engine, pack it with a beautiful chassis, and monetize it. But also disadvantages it’s easy to copy.
But let’s focus on our field for a minute product design and mechanical engineering.
Can LLMs really provide us with exceptional value? Something that delivers a 10X ROI and real impact?
That’s an open question but I’m (like you, I guess) skeptical.
I mean, LLMs are super powerful and can do complex textual tasks for us engineers edit documents, write emails, answer questions on our engineering data or industry knowledge but at the end of the day, our professional universe is physical, geometric.
If our AI understands only text it will be forever limited. Like a blind super-senior engineer who can only hear what people say about a given design. He will never be able to understand the information embedded within the designs we create, or our best practices. Only the fraction of info that lives in our documents.
Therefore, at Leo AI, we believe that the real value the 10X ROI tool that will make engineers fall in love, the tipping point of our field is going to come when an AI model that can understand and analyze CAD becomes commercially available. Then the sky’s the limit change CAD models using prompts, answer questions on your CAD models, find parts using geometric designation, find similar parts in your inventory/library, or cheaper parts in online catalogs and much more.
This is what we’re building at Leo AI a vertical-specific AI foundational model that can understand CAD. We call it LMM – Large Mechanical Model. More details about it soon…
What would you like it to do first for you? What will provide you the most value? You know best, I’d love to hear what you think at maor@getleo.ai.
AI is transforming how professionals work by automating expert-level tasks. Developers use Cursor to write and refactor code its company is now valued at $9.9B. Designers turn to Runway and Midjourney to generate visuals instantly. Marketers rely on Jasper AI for fast, high-quality copy, reaching $100M+ ARR. Even lawyers now use Harvey AI to draft contracts.
Most of these tools have a very clear common denominator they are wrappers over ChatGPT. What does that mean? That Cursor, Perplexity, Jasper, and Harvey haven’t developed a new AI model (“AI brain”) but simply wrapped it with a nice interface, added a new logo, branding, and packaged it better for their customers. I’m not trying to diminish their exceptional value to developers, content creators, and lawyers, but that’s the truth they are using existing large language models (LLMs).
This comes with significant advantages use a powerful engine, pack it with a beautiful chassis, and monetize it. But also disadvantages it’s easy to copy.
But let’s focus on our field for a minute product design and mechanical engineering.
Can LLMs really provide us with exceptional value? Something that delivers a 10X ROI and real impact?
That’s an open question but I’m (like you, I guess) skeptical.
I mean, LLMs are super powerful and can do complex textual tasks for us engineers edit documents, write emails, answer questions on our engineering data or industry knowledge but at the end of the day, our professional universe is physical, geometric.
If our AI understands only text it will be forever limited. Like a blind super-senior engineer who can only hear what people say about a given design. He will never be able to understand the information embedded within the designs we create, or our best practices. Only the fraction of info that lives in our documents.
Therefore, at Leo AI, we believe that the real value the 10X ROI tool that will make engineers fall in love, the tipping point of our field is going to come when an AI model that can understand and analyze CAD becomes commercially available. Then the sky’s the limit change CAD models using prompts, answer questions on your CAD models, find parts using geometric designation, find similar parts in your inventory/library, or cheaper parts in online catalogs and much more.
This is what we’re building at Leo AI a vertical-specific AI foundational model that can understand CAD. We call it LMM – Large Mechanical Model. More details about it soon…
What would you like it to do first for you? What will provide you the most value? You know best, I’d love to hear what you think at maor@getleo.ai.