LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
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Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#2My 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. Image art but with very exacting and important pixel placement, with precise underlying logical structure.
In my experience so far, only O3 can kind of understand an electronic schematic, but really only at a "Hello World!" level difficulty. I don't know how easy it will be to get to the point where it can render a proper schematic or edit one it is given to meet some specified electronic characteristics.
There are programming languages that are used to define drawings, but the training data would be orders of magnitude less than what is written for humans to learn from.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#3My 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.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#4My 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…
My experience is that SOTA LLMs still struggle to read even the metadata from a mechanical drawing. They're getting better -- they now are mostly ok at reading things like a BOM or revision table -- but moderately complicated title blocks often trip them up.
As for the drawings themselves, I have found them pretty unreliable at reading even quite simple things (i.e. what's the ID of the thru hole?), even when they're specifically dimensioned. As soon as spatial reasoning is required (i.e. there's a dimension from A to B and from A to C and one asks for the dimension B to C), they basically never get it right.
This is a place where there's a LOT of room for improvement.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#5My 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…
Problem #1 with text-to-image models is that focus is on producing visually attractive photo-realistic artistic images, which is completely orthogonal from what is needed for engineering: accurate, complete, self-consistent, and error-free diagrams.
Problem #2 is low control over outputs of text-to-image models. Models don't follow prompts well.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#6My 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…
Tell it how to read schematics in the prompt
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#7My 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.
Not entirely true. Routing is a very important part of electrical schematics.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#8My 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…
My experience is that SOTA LLMs still struggle to read even the metadata from a mechanical drawing. They're getting better -- they now are mostly ok at reading things like a BOM or revision table -- but moderately complicated title blocks often trip them up. As for the drawings themselves, I have found them pretty unreliable at reading even quite simple things (i.e. what's the ID of the thru hole?), even when they're…
I'm scared of something like the Xerox number-corruption bug [0], where some models will subtly fuck everything up in a way that is too expensive to recover from by the time it's discovered.
[0] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#9I think what might work is people coming together around this LLM like a God.
Similar to Rod of Iron Ministries (The Church of the AR-15) Taking what is says, fine tuning it, testing it, feeding back in and mostly waiting as LLMs improve.
LLMs will never be smarter than humans, but they can be a meeting place where people congregate to work on goals and worship.
Like QAnon, that's where the collective IQ and power comes from, something to believe in. At the micro level this is also mostly how LLMs are used in practical ways.
If you look to the Middle East there is a lot of work on rockets but a limited community working together.
Re: LLMs for Engineering: Teaching Models to Design High Powered Rockets
#10Imagine 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: "sure, let me design a bridge for you." And while he's talking, he's starring at you with his perfect blank face expression, for his mind is blank as well.
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.