Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mechanical drawings and schematics are visualizations for humans. If you look at the data structure of a gerber or DWG, it’s vectors and metadata. These happen to be great for LLMs. My hypothesis is that we haven’t done the work on that yet because the market is more interested in things like Ghibli imagery.
Ate you being facetious or is that really your hypothesis?
LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#32A fundamental problem with this entire class of machine learning is that it is based on a model / simulation of reality. "RocketPy, a high-fidelity trajectory simulation library for high-power rocketry" in this case. Nothing against this sim in particular but all such simulations that attempt to model any non-trivial system are imperfect. Nature is just too complex to model precisely and accurately. The LLM (or other…
> all such simulations that attempt to model any non-trivial system are imperfect. I believe the future of such simulation is to start from the lowest level - ie. schrodinger's equation, and get the simulator to derive all higher level stuff. Obviously the higher level models are imperfect, but then it's the AI's job to decide if a pile of soil needs to be simulated as a load of grains of sand, or as crystals of quar…
I do hate to burst your bubble here but I've been doing real-time simulation (in the form of games, 2D, 3D, VR) for enough decades to know this is only a pipe-dream.
Maybe at the point when we have a Dyson sphere and have all universally agreed upon the principles that cause an airfoil to generate lift this would be possible, otherwise it's orders of magnitude beyond all of the terrestrial compute that we have now.
To quote Han Solo, the way we do effective and convincing science and simulation now is ... "a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#33My hypothesis is until they can really nail down image to text and text to image, such that training on diagrams and drawings can produce fruitful multi modal output, classic engineering is going to be a tough nut to crack. Software engineering lends itself greatly to LLMs because it just fits so nicely into tokenization. Whereas mechanical drawings or electronic schematics are sort of more like a visual language. Im…
Try having it output the circuit in SPICE. It actually works surprisingly well and does a good job picking out components values for parts and can describe the connectivity well. It falls apart when it writes the SPICE (professionally, there isn’t really one well accepted syntax really)and making the wires to connect your components, like you say missing the minds eye. But I can imagine adding a ton spice schematics…
There are good reasons not to vibecode Verilog, but a lot of test cases are already being written by LLMs and the big EDA vendors (Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens) all tout their new AI capabilities.
It's like saying it can't read handwritten mathematical formulas, when it solves most math problems in markup (and if you aren't using it you're asking for trouble).
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#34My hypothesis is until they can really nail down image to text and text to image, such that training on diagrams and drawings can produce fruitful multi modal output, classic engineering is going to be a tough nut to crack. Software engineering lends itself greatly to LLMs because it just fits so nicely into tokenization. Whereas mechanical drawings or electronic schematics are sort of more like a visual language. Im…
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#35Imagine a fake engineer who read books about engineering as scifi, and thanks to his superhuman memory, he's mastered the engineer-speak so well that he sounds more engineery than top engineers in the world. Except that he has no clue about engineering and to him it's the same as literature or prose. Now he's tasked with designing a bridge. He pauses for a second and starts speaking, in his usual polished style: "sur…
It's worse than that. Imagine he's consistently plausibly wrong about everything, but when you point that out, people think it's just sour grapes at how smart he is.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#36A fundamental problem with this entire class of machine learning is that it is based on a model / simulation of reality. "RocketPy, a high-fidelity trajectory simulation library for high-power rocketry" in this case. Nothing against this sim in particular but all such simulations that attempt to model any non-trivial system are imperfect. Nature is just too complex to model precisely and accurately. The LLM (or other…
Depends on what your goal is. If you are trying to solve the narrow problem of rocketry or whatever, sure. But maybe not if your goal is making models smarter.
The broader context is that we need new oracles beyond math and programming in order to exercise CoT models on longer planning-horizon tasks.
In this case, if working with a toy world model lets you learn generalizable strategies (I bet it does, as video games do too) then this sort of eval can be a useful addition.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#37My hypothesis is until they can really nail down image to text and text to image, such that training on diagrams and drawings can produce fruitful multi modal output, classic engineering is going to be a tough nut to crack. Software engineering lends itself greatly to LLMs because it just fits so nicely into tokenization. Whereas mechanical drawings or electronic schematics are sort of more like a visual language. Im…
Mechanical drawings and schematics are visualizations for humans. If you look at the data structure of a gerber or DWG, it’s vectors and metadata. These happen to be great for LLMs. My hypothesis is that we haven’t done the work on that yet because the market is more interested in things like Ghibli imagery.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#38Imagine a fake engineer who read books about engineering as scifi, and thanks to his superhuman memory, he's mastered the engineer-speak so well that he sounds more engineery than top engineers in the world. Except that he has no clue about engineering and to him it's the same as literature or prose. Now he's tasked with designing a bridge. He pauses for a second and starts speaking, in his usual polished style: "sur…
> Think of the absurdity of trying to understand the Pi number by looking at its first billion digits and trying to predict the next digit. And think of what it takes to advance from memorizing digits of such numbers and predicting continuation with astrology-style logic to understanding the math behind the digits of Pi. I'm prepared to believe that a sufficiently advanced LLM around today will have some "neural" rep…
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#39My hypothesis is until they can really nail down image to text and text to image, such that training on diagrams and drawings can produce fruitful multi modal output, classic engineering is going to be a tough nut to crack. Software engineering lends itself greatly to LLMs because it just fits so nicely into tokenization. Whereas mechanical drawings or electronic schematics are sort of more like a visual language. Im…
Someone could try training a LLM on a combination of a STEP AP242 [1] data model and sample exchange files, or do the same for the Building Information Model [2].
[1] http://www.ap242.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#40My hypothesis is until they can really nail down image to text and text to image, such that training on diagrams and drawings can produce fruitful multi modal output, classic engineering is going to be a tough nut to crack. Software engineering lends itself greatly to LLMs because it just fits so nicely into tokenization. Whereas mechanical drawings or electronic schematics are sort of more like a visual language. Im…
Electrical schematics can be represented with linear algebra and Boolean logic… Maybe their being able to “understand” such schematics is just a matter of them becoming better at mathematical logic…which is pretty objective.
It works explicitly because it doesn't hit the often counter-intuitive limitations with generalization in pure math.
Remember that Boolean circuit satisfiability is NP-complete, and is beyond UHAT's + poly length CoT expressibility, which is capped at PTIME.
Even int logic with boolean circuits is in PSPACE.
When you start to deal with values, you are going to have to add in heuristics and/or find reductions that will cost your generalizability.
Even if you model analog circuits as finite labelled directed graphs with labelled vertices, similar to what Shannon used; removing some of the real world electrical impacts and focus on them as computational units, the complexity can get crazy fast.
Those circuits, with specific constraints (IIRC local feedback, etc..) can be simulated by a Turing machine, but require ELEMENTARY space or time, and despite it's name ELEMENTARY is iterated exponential: 2^2^2^2^2^...^n with k n's.
Also note that P/poly, viewed as problems that can be solved by small circuits is not a practical class and in fact contains all of the unary languages that we know are unsolvable by real computers in the general case.
That apparent paradox that P/poly, which has small bool circuits, also contains all of those undecidable unary languages is a good starter into that rat hole.
While we will have tools and models that are better at math logic, the constrains are actually limits on computation in the general case. Generalization often has these types of costs, and the RL benefits in this case relate to demonstrating that IMHO.