In every office, there is someone with so much accumulated knowledge the boss wants to “clone” them. At structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti (TT), they’ve basically done that. The firm has taken the concept of a “digital twin” to a newly literal level – engineers can now quiz a synthetic clone of the firm’s in-house welding and metallurgy expert, constructed from 30years of his files and emails. Chief Technology Officer Robert Otani tells Unfrozen where TT is taking generative artificial intelligence (GAI) next.

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Intro/Outro: “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx

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Discussed:

·     ZHA’s Patrik Schumacher keynote at the AIACenter for Architecture’s AI+A Symposium, 16 December 2023

·     Dall-E, ChatGPT, Midjourney, OpenAI

·     HOU 3000: Serpentine Galleries’ virtualchief curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist

·     TT’s Spark Intranet

·     Cornell Tech Jacobs Institute: TheFuture of Generative AI in Architecture, Design and Engineering

·     TT made a digital twin of welding and metallurgy expert Mike DeLashmit. The real Mike gives "Mike 2.0" a “4.7 out of 5” in terms of the accuracy of its answers.

·     Converting scanned PDF drawings with annotations into vectors + tabular data

·     Google Gemini

·     A “hallucination throttle” for generative AIiterations on existing documents

·     Using AI to optimize material quantities,operational energy, and eventually, embodied carbon