Accelerating engineering for the physical world

Today, we’re sharing advances in how OpenAI models help engineers design, simulate, and build physical products. These capabilities span mechanical and electrical engineering and end-to-end system design, and are already helping our internal teams test ideas and iterate faster.

Across these projects, engineers need to bring together mechanical designs, electronics, software, and manufacturing requirements using specialized tools. We’re teaching models to support that work, from preparing drawings and setting up simulations to coordinating changes across disciplines. Our goal is to give engineers more time to explore ideas and improve designs.

Over the past year, improved frontier model capabilities have helped our internal teams test new ideas and iterate faster, and we are seeing early evidence of these capabilities improving professional workflows in industry as well. We’re working with collaborators to understand where these capabilities can make the biggest difference and what needs to improve. If you’re an engineer, engineering firm, or software vendor involved in the design, simulation, manufacturing, or production of complex physical products, we’d love to work with you to shape this effort around the tools you use and the problems you need to solve.

Designing a device with Astra

We tested Astra’s state-of-the-art performance⁠ in multimodal and computer use workflows by seeing if we can create a device without any direct human edits. To do this, we used GPT‑6 to define the functional requirements and design the enclosure, printed circuit board (PCB), and software integrations needed to create a device users can use to talk to Codex.

Two team members designed this test device with Astra in under a week while working on it as a side project. A contract manufacturer built a small batch of prototypes in under a month.

Accelerating OpenAI hardware teams

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