I recently had a really impressive 3D CAD work result from an LLM - I had a photo I wanted to frame and I gave GPT 6 Astra a really low effort picture (a photograph placed next to an open mouth vernier caliper for scale) and asked it to create a frame for the image.
And well… it did. (I really wish I had picked a better colour for the frame but I was way too excited about this to wait for a new roll of filament to arrive)
This got me thinking - I haven’t actually tested how good LLMs are at CAD. Someone I was talking to mentioned they had been using LLMs for mechanical design and so it struck me that I obviously didn’t realize that LLMs are starting to have workable 3D design/reasoning capabilities.
So… on to the next test.
Fix a Broken 3D Scan Mesh
I performed a partial scan on a 3D printed clamp I had lying around, fed it into AI, and asked it to recreate it.
To my surprise, it did.
There was a period in between where it was about to deliver the CAD to me but hadn’t yet added the threaded hole for the screw to pass through but before delivering it, it caught itself, corrected itself, and also added what I would consider a reasonable amount of clearance for the screw to work with 3D printed parts (if it was me I may add more clearance just cause I can’t be bothered reprinting it).
This is cool and looking forward to experimenting with these capabilities more! If anyone feels like inspecting the 3D files, here they are: