January 2025
Deep Thinking 🤔
Esta joined us full-time on the marketing side (we’re so lucky!), and working with her has pushed me to examine and elaborate on some of the Authentise fundamentals.
The first push was a white paper I wrote in Nov about the importance of intent capture. To be fair, that idea came from Alex Champion, the stalwart of the Ministry of Defence additive efforts. They have a new program coming up, and I had hoped that they’d include a focus on intent.
The reason I think that’s so important, in short, is that everytime our capabilities change (new machines, or new locations with different machines), we need to re-engineer and re-certify the parts. That’s super labour intensive, as is identifying potential use cases for new technologies. If, instead of communicating designs, we managed to capture intent in its raw form, we would be able to proceed right to generative design algorithms (still to be improved) and update the design in a flash.
I’ve talked about this a LOT it turns out (this is an article on it from Forbes in 2019). Yet, I’m glad to get the thoughts on Authentise letterhead, primarily because of the recent release on Threads. While Threads solves urgent problems today (efficiency in engineering collaboration, transparency and more), intent capture is the long-term game. If more people understood that, the world would be full of Threads like tools. As they don’t, our first job is to make Threads as attractive as possible for users today.
AI is one of the ways we’re doing that. I’m proud we’ve been one of the first to use the new Large Language Models in engineering and manufacturing with 3DGPT in early 2023. Since then, we’ve leveraged the learnings we made from that project to deploy production use cases across Threads. You can now: get suggestions (anyone remember MSFT’s Clippy??) for events creation or updates, investigate your projects and even summarize them into templatized documents with ThreadsDoc.
I’m even more excited about what is coming. The difference now vs the first couple of efforts is that the market has caught on, and many of the efforts are now paid for by customers – they are no longer grant-funded. This presentation summarizing our AI efforts so far also includes some of the new use cases we’re looking at. In general, we’re going to stay pragmatic. I’ve got an article coming out on Monday on 3DPrint.com (early draft here) that highlights why I think pragmatism in this area is so important
We can discuss that together at AMS on Tuesday if you’re there? I’ll also be at MilAM (as Josh has to be somewhere else) and planning for Rapid and AMUG too. Ping me if you’ll be there!
PS: Oh, I almost forgot the team released a fantastic update to shipping. Now Flows has 3 shipping methods: individual parts shipped by themselves, whole order shipment (wait for it all to be done to ship), or partial shipments (ship what’s ready, when you’re ready). Talk about pragmatic approaches 🙂 This team just keeps delivering!!
