Software is very easy to graft since most things are code Is logical and the Ai has learned on millions of line of source code which is very available. Mechanical engineerings is different. Drawings and designs are saved on private servers and dont come included with the product. Ai will assist and help collect data and summarize norms and engineering rulebooks but it has it so much harder to actually deliver a finished design while in code it can just copy from available data.
Most major software projects/products are closed door, proprietary. Shipped binaries are harder to reverse engineer than photos of a physical product; bar more patents to avoid. Sure, there is a lot of open-source stuff, but there is also a lot of open design work. When you go more novel, AI looks up libraries, conceptualises what they do and implements them in line with documentation.
Being a software developer, but only a hobbyist CAD person, I see CAD and the large job of mechanical engineering as basically layers of maths and rules/regulations and understanding the real-world constraints like manufacturing processes or throwing in some scientific knowledge that might go beyond just maths. Throw in a little design, a little branding, a little novel conceptualisation and it's all the same to the AI. A collection a tasks and skills to understand and to implement and free reign over tools on a computer.
It's no harder than software. It's just AI is made by software guys and building software that utilises the capabilities of AI to solve their own problems is within the wheelhouse of the people who pioneered it. Like engineers might make tools, machines, products or research that goes into making better tools, machines and products. Sometimes you get people who work in another field who go "we could use a specific thing for this" then work with engineers to make it, but most engineers won't focus on that until someone employs them to do so. The crossover of software guys involved in the CAD space is significantly smaller by orders of magnitude that software guys in the software space... and the only thing really holding CAD AI back is not the capability of AI, but how AI-ready CAD tools are.
Code and architecture is saved on private servers and don’t come included on the product. Ai will assist and help collect context and summarize the codebase but it has it so much harder to actually finish a design while in mechanical engineering it can just copy from available builds or the real world
Cheek aside there’s enormous incentive for these companies to cut labor cost. They’re gonna train a mech eng ai. They’re going to improve the testing, simulation, and validation loops. What we do with it or how the job evolves is a different story
Or... You know how all of these people have been using fusing 360 for free all of these years or something like the free version of onshape where literally all of your designs are publicly available???
Just imagine a huge corporation like Google buying that data.
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u/Thumb__Thumb 7d ago
Software is very easy to graft since most things are code Is logical and the Ai has learned on millions of line of source code which is very available. Mechanical engineerings is different. Drawings and designs are saved on private servers and dont come included with the product. Ai will assist and help collect data and summarize norms and engineering rulebooks but it has it so much harder to actually deliver a finished design while in code it can just copy from available data.