AI Integration for Structural Engineering
AI Integration for Structural Engineering

AI Integration for Structural Engineering

I've been tasked by my supervisor to research AI platforms and how they might be useful or integrated into our workflow.

We're a small structural engineering firm outside Washington D.C., working mainly in government contracts.

My entire experience and expertise is in structural engineering, but I know a little about LLM's like ChatGPT or Gemini, like that they learn from preset training data. I also know they can sometimes produce questionable results regarding technical topics.

I have a few questions, if anyone is willing to help point me in the right direction. Resources and webinars you'd recommend would also be a huge help.

  1. Can you feed LLM's your own training data? If so, what kind of programming knowledge would be required for this?
  2. Is there any way to make an LLM provide sources for it's answers?
  3. Can sources be restricted to our own training data, such as building codes?
  4. How is training data fed to an LLM?
  5. Could an AI model be taught to write something like a project specification document based off a template?

Based on initial research, I get the feeling the benefit is going to be very limited, with a high potential for errors. I'm expected to give a presentation on this topic in a few weeks, so if I'm going to dissuade the higher ups from trying to push us towards this new tool, I want to make sure my argument is ironclad.

Thanks for your help, feel free to DM me if you wish.

Edit: If I'm being too pessimistic and this is actually something that might be beneficial, let me know.

submitted by /u/SuperRicktastic
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