The CAD Insider

ChatGPT Hijacks a CAD Conference

(Image generated with DALL-E 2 using the title of this blog entry as the prompt. Quote is mine)

The word of the conference was to have been “imagine” but all the chat was about ChatBot. The AI chat sensation derailed one presentation after another. Presenters gave up their subject to talk about AI and ChatGPT – not because they were being pestered by a rude press corp, but willingly. anticipating the questions that never came. They had presumed that it was the only thing on the media’s mind. It’s easy to see why. Every day leading up to the conference, they had been showered with article after article in the popular and business media about ChatGPT.

After one presenter volunteered the subject of ChatGPT, a  journalist dared to ask how close we were to the dreaded dreaded Singularity, referring to the point at which AI can starts improving itself, quickly becoming smarter than its creators. We, the people, no longer of any use to this super intelligent sentient being, are eliminated.

That’s just science fiction, right?

ChatGPT is the two month-old baby of an San Francisco AI startup no one paid much attention to until Microsoft gave it a $10 billion dollar present. Suddenly, it was the cutest, smartest baby in the world.

But ChatGPT is more like a con artist than a baby. You want to believe what it says because it looks so believable. Its answers are well formed, grammatically correct. Once it takes human form, it will most certainly have an English accent and wear a suit.

Like a con artist, ChatGPT lies. It’s answers to questions were incorrect when it was introduced and continue to be incorrect an alarming number of times. If you are using ChatGPT for research or for engineering information, you had better check every answer.

You would think journalists and engineers, other who pride themselves in truth and accuracy, would consider themselves safe from being made obsolete by such a charlatan.

The technologists move to allay the fears of obsolescence they presume are in the room . Fear is only the first stage in the acceptance of any revolutionary technology. To prove his point, they give an example.

“I asked ChatGPT to generate code for [sophisticated geometry] and it generated perfectly structured code.”

“Did it work?” His colleague asks.

“No. But I fixed it.”

He was trying to show how useful ChatGPT could be, how a developer could have used ChatGPT to get 90% of the way there.

I tried to get ChatGPT to finish this article but I was not nearly as successful.

I guess my job (journalist and engineer) is safe. Mostly. For now.

Google Stumbles in the Race for the Perfect Answering Machine

The anticipation for Google’s Feb 8 event was high. Alphabet, Google’s parent company was to deliver its answer to ChatGPT, the precocious chatbot that has AI-addled world in a tizzy with its ability to answer college-level essay questions, program code, name your dog... and God knows what else.

But Google did not deliver. A beta version of its chatbot was still a month away and still not ready for public testing. We do have a name, though. Bard. After Shakespeare, I presume. But wait, don’t go, they said. Look at all the marvelous things we've done with AI.

A series of innovations Google had previously introduced was listed in case you had missed them. Google does tends to slip things in and to give you joy on discovering them, without fanfare. Like its calculator, which I discovered accidentally can do all sorts of math and plotting. It was never announced, never productized and still doesn’t have a name, it’s interface still only the search box. To enjoy it you have to know about it. It’s like the secret menu at In ‘n Out.

We gave you Google Assistant years ago, says the Google presenter. It’s practically a ChatGPT plus voice activation. And don’t you love the visual search, the presenter asks. We have made the camera the keyboard.

I did not know about it. They never told me.

And Google Maps has an immersive view, they say.

I try to find it and cannot. It must be available for Android phones. I have an iPhone.

“You want something new?,” they say, perhaps remote sensing my interest waning through my Google smart speaker. “We have an app for arts and culture.”

I’m not sure anyone asked for an app for arts and culture from Google. It sounds like a pet project by Google engineers wishing they knew a little bit more about paintings and opera and assuming everyone else did, too. .

A presenter reaches for her smart phone (no doubt a Google Pixel) but can’t find it. I died for her. But it was hardly the worst fail in live product introductions. Remember the blue screen of death when Bill Gates was introducing Windows 98? Or when they shattered the “bulletproof” glass of Tesla’s new Cybertruck by throwing steel balls at it? “But it didn’t go through,” says Elon Musk.

Why do tech companies insist on live events, I wondered and laughed. Elon Musk doesn’t need my pity.

By the time the Paris event was livestreaming, the damage had already been done. Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai had announced the company’s chatbot, Bard, with a sampling of questions that Bard could answer. It should have been a master stroke, the search giant able to field and correctly answer questions spanning human knowledge, the robot equivalent of Peter Jennings (Jeopardy! Champion) with the vast reach of Google, or the head reference librarian at the Library of Congress. Except one of the answers was wrong. So stated Reuters, the news agency that prides itself on getting it right, which had done the fact check that Google, in its haste to pull even with ChatGPT, had not. The James Webb Telescope didn't discover exoplanets. The European Southern Observatory's telescope did. It was a mistake that could easily have been avoided if Pichai had used Google instead of Bard.

Bad news travels fast these days. Investors were quick to punish Google for the blunder, sending Alphabet shares down 9% -- a loss of $100 billion in market value—before they evened out.

More important and more permanent may be how this reflects on Google. The uncontested search leader for 25 years, has Google gone from novelty to yesterday’s news? Has Google become the new Microsoft, a company whose products you use all the time, even depend on, but have lost the luster of the shiny new objects?

Google still has the best search, bar none. It has taken great care in sorting the Internet, referring us to safe sites. We can be sure Google will not send us to a site bent on swindling us, using copied articles or one that has spoofed its way to the top of the search results.

Google had resisted introducing its chatbot until that fateful Wednesday because it was not ready for public use. Google is now an established company with a reputation to preserve. Bard was unnamed and being tested. Wisely, it was held back to avoid the risk of an embarrassing failures of chatbots past. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay made it sixteen hours before spewing a series of racist and racist and misogynistic tweets and Microsoft had to shut it down. Meta (formerly Facebook) yanked its chatbot Galactica after it “spat our biased and incorrect nonsense,” according to TechnologyReview.com.

Google is trying to be more “responsible,” as it stated 4 times during the livestream.

No doubt Googles leadership panicked upon hearing that ChatGPT landed a $10 billion investment from its arch enemy, Microsoft. It was easy to see how Microsoft could, with ChatGPT’s technology, make Bing, the most expensive search engine nobody uses, to one that leapfrogs Google.

Pichai, in a panic, issued a code red to his managers and called Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, back into the building for an emergency meeting and followed quickly (too quickly) with his fateful product announcement – overpromising the accuracy of a product still at least months away from prime time. It would have been wise to wait, issue a more reserved statement, as “we are working on it” sort of thing, and continue with having Bard learn and testing it, making sure it can provide the right answer, say 99% of the time. No company besides Alphabet has the resources to do that or such a head start in search and AI.

A little patience would not kill them.

Should ChatGPT be Renamed CliffGPT?

Should OpenAI adopt the face of Cliff Clavin, the mailman from Cheers, for its ChatGPT? Cliff always had an explanation for everything, but it was not always right. Here is a picture from YouTube video of Cliff on Jeopardy! on an episode of Cheers.

ChatGPT exists in a question and answer format and for it to be more human, could use a face. No better face than of Cliff Clavin, the lovable know-it-all, a regular at Boston’s fictitious bar, Cheers? Then OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) could call it CliffGPT. Like Cliff, ChatGPT is great entertainment, great for being initially impressive in some some subjects but ultimately proves unreliable and untrustworthy in mission critical subjects. Like engineering. I tried. Read about it here: ChatGPT Has All the Answers – But Not Always the Right Ones.

You should not design a plane or a dam around CliffGPT answers.  It’s knowledge and reasoning may have let it pass medical exams but I doubt if could pass the EIT exam and pretty sure it would bomb the PE exam.

But stay tuned. Microsoft just pumped $10 billion into OpenAI. ChatGPT is only going to get smarter, wiser...

Water Shortage is One Thing, but Lights Out?

(Image from Wikipedia)

It may be hard to see thousand-year trends in a daily newspaper, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

The WSJ is reporting on the US Bureau of Reclamation cutting back the use of the water from the Colorado River. That’s part of the two trends. The first is too many people (overpopulation) and too much heat (climate change).

The Colorado River starts near Denver, where it picks up its name before slices off the corner off Utah and snaking through the Grand Canyon, separating Arizona from Nevada and California before it dumps into Mexico’s Gulf of California. Except there hasn’t been any dumping for many years now. The US states have damned the river and siphoned off so much of the river water for irrigation and consumption that none of it is left to flow into Mexico.

The US West has been baked with heat waves. This year, we got some rain but a lot of the water evaporated in the heat. Lake Mead, created by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, is at the lowest level since the dam was built.

With every state helping itself of Colorado River water, the federal government had to step in. And so, we have been put on rations. Though not all of us, though. California, on the edge of the massive Colorado River basin but its biggest user, is left out of the Bureau of Reclamation’s recent limits.

If you’re thinking “So what? I can flush my toilet less and get bottled water,” think of doing that in the dark. If water levels go much lower in Lake Mead or Lake Powell, the hydroelectric power generation stops completely. There go the Western power grids.

What Exactly is a Digital Transformation?

“Digital transformation” may be the latest industry buzzword. The Big Four CAD vendors (Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Siemens) and other software vendors insist every manufacturer needs to undergo a digital transformation, and in doing so, will gain a competitive advantage since it’s still the early days of digital transformation adoption. But ignore the need for a digital transformation for too long and your company will be hopelessly left behind.

But what exactly is a digital transformation? Perhaps your company is already undergoing a digital transformation at its own speed and in its own way, and not even know it is transforming according to what has been prescribed by the technology vendors. Maybe a digital transformation is just a “hurry up” from technology vendors who are growing impatient for its adoption?

It would not be the first time software companies have coined a term for products they sell. Computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing and computer aided engineering (now more commonly called simulation) were offered by software companies as solutions for problems manufacturing companies did not know they had. CAD, CAM and CAE are now commonly accepted as genuine needs. CAD, CAE and CAM were followed by PLM -- at least by by Dassault Systèmes, PTC and Siemens. Autodesk held out, declaring as late as the Carl Bass era, that PLM was not really a thing.

“The only people who need PLM are the ones selling PLM,” Bass quotes in Kenneth Wong’s record along with “PLM is a solution in search of a problem.”

Digital transformation, however, is in more need of definition than CAD, CAM, CAE and PLM – if only because there is no single software application to supply it. It still floats into a conversation as vague concept, but one that demands that you, if you are at all tech savvy, should know about it.

Autodesk, a vendor serious about digital transformation, convened a Who’s Who of industry consultants to make the concept clearer at their Accelerate 2022 conference. Onstage and on the spot, the consultants valiantly attempted to agree on a definition of a digital transformation, on its need and on its implementation.

It would have been nice if they would have established milestones so companies could judge how complete was their own digital transformation, but this was only an hour-long discussion. This was not a formal standards committee. And, let’s face it: a  Autodesk conference was hardly the place to quibble about the necessity for a digital transformation when your host has requested that you discuss its merits.

The Shape of Things to Come

Stephen Hooper, Vice President & General Manager, Design & Manufacturing Cloud Solutions at Autodesk, is about to reveal what is coming up in generative design. He is at a Q&A session at Accelerate 2022 conference. He is not making an official announcement as the technology is still in R&D. If it were up to the PR watchdogs in the room, he would go no further. But Hooper’s enthusiasm is not to be bridled.

“We’re going to use ML [machine language] to look for similar shapes,” he says about the next generation of Autodesk’s generative design, which will, no doubt, be manifest itself in Fusion 360, the company’s do-all design and manufacturing platform.

We will be able to create a 3D map of your shape and match it with another existing shape, he states. Engineers reinvent the wheel all the time, he implies.

We asked if the generative design of this future could not only look for similar parts, but look for similar elemental or primitive shapes, such as I-beams or round tubes, the shapes engineers rely on.

Yes, says Hooper. It certainly will.

Hooper, whose youthful figure belies decades of CAD experience, tells of his initial introduction to CAD with Unigraphics. His conversion to Autodesk came when he realized that, despite Unigraphics superiority in CAD, its expense was a hindrance.

“For what we paid for a few UG seats, we could outfit a hundred engineers with Fusion 360 today,” says Hooper.

He invokes a Moneyball reference, the movie with Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) creates a pennant winning major league franchise (the Oakland A’s) by recruiting underrated (and therefore underpaid) players and creating an overall better team when tradition was to win with one or two (very expensive) superstars. While this could be considered an admission of PC-based AutoCAD’s inferiority to the workstation-based CAD, the point Hooper is making is consistent with Autodesk’s humble approach to democratizing design, simulation and manufacturing software.

Only 3% of Us Want to Work from Home? Can this be Right?

Only 3% of employees want to work from home 100% of the time, says Kim Dabbs, Global VP, ESG + Social Innovation at Steelcase, citing her company’s survey at Autodesk’s Accelerate 2022 conference currently taking place in New Orleans. Can this be right? Most employees we hear from are fine where they are, mostly working from home except for going to the office “as needed.” That’s code for “as little as possible.”

Consider the source. Steelcase exists to make office furniture and fixtures and a permanent and complete change to a work at home status for workers in their markets is an existential problem. Steelcase is asking the question and presenting the result in a manner that is to their advantage. The same question to a US market increases the figure of employees wanting to work from home 100% of the time by 40% (5%). Asking the same demographic whether they want to work at home most of the time may yield a result much higher, more in keeping with the common perception – and less advantageous to a manufacturer of office furniture.

Diébédo Francis Kéré Receives 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize

The “Nobel Prize for architecture,” the Pritzker goes to the unlikeliest place on Earth, landlocked Burkina Faso and its native son, Diébédo Francis Kéré.

Burkina who, you might ask. You are not alone. Burkina Faso has this entry in the CIA World Factbook:

“By late 2021, insecurity in Burkina Faso had displaced 1.4 million people and led to significant jumps in humanitarian needs and food insecurity. In addition to terrorism, the country faces a myriad of problems including high population growth, recurring drought, pervasive and perennial food insecurity, and limited natural resources. It is one of the world’s poorest countries.”

So a country with dirt roads and mud huts now has an entry into architecture’s most hallowed clubs? Has the world become apologetic, or simply gone mad?

Kéré, a black man, stands out in the gallery of previous winners of the Pritzker: mostly white males and a few women. Asians seem to have been allowed into the club for a few years and constitute a small minority but perhaps only because Japan, a country that has played nicely with the West (since WWII, anyway), has long upheld aesthetics standards over simple survival.

Forgive me for noticing. Living as a minority in the US and the UK, I’m a tad sensitive to race issues.  

What country has the most architects per capita? (Picture courtesy of ArchDaily)

I am not first to study this issue on the basis of region, if not race. ArchDaily did it over 8 years ago and discovered China has the most number of architects per inhabitant, with one architect for every 40,000 people. The US is 13^th, with each architect serving 1300 people. As you might expect, super style conscious Italy has the most: one architect for only 414 people. Strangely and conspicuously absent is India. But what do you expect for a country that may not even acknowledge architecture as a noble calling?

From my days in India, if you were not a doctor, engineer, your parents could not have bragged about what you did in the matrimonial.  In recent years, IT and tech may have been included in along with a man’s marriageable assets,  but architects…?

As Larry David might say, “Umm….we're thinking about it.”

Back in the Circuit

Here at the Siemens Media and Analyst event (#MAC22)  it is clear how much all we CAD insiders have missed live events. 

Seated for lunch, here some snatches of conversation.

“I was heading for to the 2 million mile club,” says  one analyst whose climb to the prestigious United Airlines level that grants one—and their spouse – special privileges for life was thwarted.

“My investments… I don’t know where they’re heading,” said another analyst through his mask (it is still COVID remember?), a reference to the Ukraine war, I believe. 

“I had to take a Delta flight and had to sit at the back of the plane,” moans one who has long been faithful to United, which has a San Francisco hub. 

Many from Siemens are genuinely overjoyed to see people face to face. For PR, which counts on establishing personal relationships, the event was a huge relief.

We have dinner on the 72^nd floor of Detroit’s Renaissance Center), snacks at the technology showcase (LIFT). These are experiences you cannot create with Zoom meetings.

For analysts, however haughty, there’s nothing like being face to face with a client to cement a consulting gig, the next white paper of webinar. And for media too long chained to their work-at-home-desks, kids at their feet and dogs barking to be let out, lousy salaries, jetting somewhere (even if is Detroit) is a welcome respite.

Shapr3D, Hungary Step Up to Support Ukraine

I spoke to István Csanády, CEO and founder of Shapr3D in Budapest about an exciting product release tomorrow. At the end, I had to ask how he, the company, and Hungary are dealing with the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

"There are a 100,000 Ukrainian refugees right now in Hungary," says István . The team is working very hard to to help them out. Shapr3D is matching everyone who donates 1 to 3% of their salaries to help refugees. The team has also been helping to with shelter, food, and accommodation to refugees. We are making sandwiches here in the office and taking then to the railway station. We are sending supplies, too."

"We have been working really really hard to to do as much as we as we can," he adds. "We have a lot of history in the last 100 years with similar events from from Russia. I can tell you like those are not not our best memories."