Newcomers Who Bet $9 Billion on AI for MCAD, Part 1
Opinion by Ralph Grabowski
With talk swirling of a LLM-based AI financial bubble collapse, taking place this year perhaps [source, source], investors are looking into different forms of AI. “These [LLM, large-language model] systems can never truly understand the world, because they can’t move through it,” says Patrick Vanbrabandt of Carya [source].
Dassault Systèmes ceo Pascal Daloz agrees, saying “The world is not made of words, but of molecules, atoms, and energy.” What they mean is that LLM-based AI is incapable of understanding our world, for it is locked in an airtight room filled with words scraped from the Internet. LLMs lack understanding.
In the past year, several companies announced they plan to model reality with ‘World Model AI’. This form artificial intelligence trains software to understand how the real world works using physics, 3D spaces, and so on.
World Model AI is best known for training self-driving cars, which need to be taught what can be driven on — and what must be driven around. Now the remit of World Model AI is expanding to include Everything. So its financial supporters hope.
Project Prometheus
Six billion dollars went into a new CAD/CAM company, nicknamed Project Prometheus. The New York Times newspaper revealed it last November, saying, “The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles” [source]. The company is co-chaired and co-funded by Jeff Bezos, the former ceo of Amazon.
And that’s all we are told, other than the firm’s tagline, AI For the Physical Economy [source]. Nearly a year after launching, the company remains silent. Still, we can piece Prometheus together from sources, such as employees hired and other areas in which Bezos is involved.
From biographies on LinkedIn, we can tell that most of the employees are in AI, such as autonomous intelligence and neural networks. A very few are from CAD-related fields, such as real-time simulation of industrial particulate flows.
More are needed. Co-founder William Guss made an appeal on Twitter (X) for “Anyone in manufacturing and builds real things. Really trying to understand the space and see some factories :)” [source].
CIO.com last week reported that Prometheus apparently is raising further tens of billions of dollars to acquire companies. Specifically, it is looking for parts of the industrial sector affected by artificial intelligence [source].
Extensible pickup truck as imaged by Slate Auto
Another hint comes from Bezos’s own involvement in manufacturing: Blue Origin’s reusable rockets and Slate’s low-cost electric trucks. My conclusion is that Prometheus wants to build an in-house CAD/CAM system assisted by a form of AI that understand the physical world to drive down development and manufacturing costs.
nVidia and Synopsis
Last December, Nvidia copied Bezos by buying $2 billion worth of Synopsis shares. Synopsis is the biggest electronic design software firm, and new owner of simulation stalwart Ansys. Patrick Moorhead of Moore Insights says, “The partnership is a big tell for where AI likely goes next: engineering, simulation, and digital twins” [source].
A multi-year agreement places nVidia’s CUDA, Agentic AI, and Omniverse into Synopsis software.
CUDA is the programming interface for nVidia’s graphics boards (GPUs), short for ‘Compute Unified Device Architecture’. GPUs are used for accelerating everything from games, to CAD, to crypto currency mining, and now for AI by running thousands or millions of strands of programming code in parallel.
Agentic AI works on multi-step problems. (AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, handle a single prompt [question] at a time.) Agents are seen as a next stage in AI helping users, but come up against blockages like needing permission (like passwords) to access data and difficult-to-navigate Web sites. For this reason, the AI industry in December endorsed MCP [model context protocol] to “tell AI models which external tools, data sources, and workflows they’re able to access, then allow them to connect and perform tasks,” says AI reporter Hayden Field [source].
Omniverse displaying SimScale’s CFD-generated wind simulation
nVidia’s Omniverse is s set of APIs [application programming interfaces] and SDKs [software development kits]. CAD vendors use it to illustrate real-time effects in massive models. SimScale deploys it to combine cityscapes with wind simulations generated by its CFD [computation fluid dynamics] software.
Hexagon ADAS
World Model AI is not as new as these new companies would like us to think it is. Hexagon of Sweden has been working on it for close to a decade in its ADAS [advanced driver-assistance system] program [source].
Hexagon’s reality capture recording physical structures
Hexagon’s reality capture software records physical structures along roads as 3D point clouds. Then its Virtual Test Drive software simulates vehicles driving along the roads, taking into account the 3D model, vehicle software and hardware, and the driver.
Next week: Part 2, World Model AI in MCAD
[This material first appeared in Design Engineering magazine, and is reproduced with permission. It has been updated.]
That;'s a good point. Civil engineering ought to be a natural. I think that World Modeling is at the input stage, where scans of the world are input, but not output, where it's used to create designs of roads and so on.
Another good article, thanks Ralph.
Question: has your research uncovered any (useful) AI apps targeted at land development civil engineering? There are several apps out there which certainly lack the "World Model AI" - the outputs have nothing to do with how we design sites.
Thanks,
Mark