Concept to Manufacturing: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Engineering Design - Kristen M. Edwards

Recorded at CDFAM Computational Design Symposium, Berlin, 2024

Presenter: Kristen M. Edwards

Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s DeCoDE Lab

Engineering Design is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of AI, marking a new era in how we approach product, system, and service planning. Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in enabling this shift. Yet, with text as their only input modality, they cannot leverage the large body of visual artifacts that engineers have used for centuries and are accustomed to. This gap is addressed with the release of multimodal vision language models, such as GPT-4 with vision, enabling AI to impact many more types of tasks. In light of these advancements, this work presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4 with vision across a wide spectrum of engineering design tasks, categorized into four main areas: Conceptual Design, System-Level and Detailed Design, Manufacturing and Inspection, and Engineering Education Tasks.

The CDFAM Computational Design Symposium Series brings together leading experts from design, engineering, architecture, academia and software development for a series of knowledge sharing and networking events focusing on computational design at all scales.

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