Happy pre-Valentines to you! May you enjoy the week regardless of your relationship status.

Apple’s big bet on the future of computing

The bell rings with a crisp sound. Microsoft Copilot comes out of the corner light on its feet, weaving around its opponent, and tries to land a lightning fast jab towards it. Google Gemini is unfazed, ducking around and countering with a strong hook to the body. Blood splatters as the juggernauts face off. Meanwhile, the third of this triumphant trio seems content to go at its own pace, lounging to the side, sipping the figurative fancy cocktail with a mini umbrella. Apple is keen to focus on its own vision (pun intended) of the future, “spatial computing”.

The actual future of computing aside (don’t even get me started on quantum computers), the development of XR (catch all term for Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and Virtual Reality) and its ramifications on the construction industry are only starting to be felt. A lot more architecture firms use XR to help wow their clients than ever before and there are even some adventurous general contractors who have upped the ante and have done full virtual walkthroughs for the project team. I haven’t, however, seen many actual structural engineering use-cases of XR, so if you do know of them, let me know!

What is your LLM/“AI” company strategy?

As set out in “Letter from the YouTube CEO: 4 Big bets for 2024” and probably millions other business strategy documents, the #1 bullet point for this year (and possibly the next 10) is probably “AI” related. It’s an amazing time where the path forwards for everyone in the industry remains so open to different possibilities. Will your company’s implementation be an AI DJ? A Q&A knowledge system for all your docs? Or something more? Applied back down to AEC firms, the really effective use of LLMs becomes that much harder to conceptualize. Overall, the broad contribution pattern of LLMs in an AEC firm could fall under the two following categories:

• Enhancing the productivity of individual employees, increasing quality and speed of work through content generation, review, and research.

• Operating as autonomous agents that can reliably complete tasks within a larger scope (though when this will actually happen is up for debate)

Lightning Round

• Gemini is released for the public! That includes Canada too, wow!

• More research is released to enable “Agile But Safe” movement. Ability to navigate construction obstacles could pave the way towards more robots on site.

Quick Tips

• Career tip time! One of the most dangerous things to a practicing engineer is their unknown unknowns. Be proactive about figuring out where your boundaries of knowledge lie and try to anticipate things that might come bite you in the ass later.