alt Hacker NewsI just posted this somewhere else -- but overall big fan of these text to cad rigs as projects.
Obligatory mention of https://zoo.dev/ who went to extreme lengths on this.
I will say I explored this reasonably deeply and came away with the conclusion that even though we have OpenSCAD and all these examples, LLMs are still very weak at spatial reasoning compared to diffusion models.
You can do all sorts of tricks like have a parts library to get around this and do physics checks but another inconvenient truth is whenever you design a complex assembly, every change to that part needs to be aware of the other parts in the design -- thus you need a global part-aware editing capability from diffusion.
That's getting solved already in china leading labs, and bottlenecked by the lack of good training data, which china is solving with mass labor.
This will be solved overseas first before we will in the US.
p.s. I am not affiliated with zoo or any of these other things FYI was just very curious about this whole area
Replies
> That's getting solved already in china leading labs, and bottlenecked by the lack of good training data, which china is solving with mass labor.
What work are you referring to here?
Zoo doesn't seem to be a great website, on my normally sized display there is a small horizontal scrollbar that moves like 5 pixels
> LLMs are still very weak at spatial reasoning compared to diffusion models
Don't know what diffusion model can do, but 100% agree with the "LLMS are very weak at spatial reasoning" comment.
I build a rather complex blueprint-image-to-3D-brep-model a couple of months back using codex ... ugh the damn thing has really no idea where things are in space, something a 3 year old figures out instinctively.
It did end up saving some time as compared to modeling the object myself in a CAD package, but there was so many completely obvious thing I had to explain ... very hard to believe when compared to what codex can pull of with code.
I've been watching the space as well, waiting for the day I can stop fiddling with widgets and just tell the damn thing about the shapes I want and the ways in which they will move. Alas, we're far from that yet.
> That's getting solved already in china leading labs
Care to drop a bit of info as a follow up to this claim? Curious!