Welcome to this week’s edition of Architecture Insights. A weekly newsletter on artificial intelligence for architects, landscape architects, and designers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly evident in everyday work. They are the base of AI tools like ChatGPT, Adobe, and Midjourney, and might soon be the base of all our tools.

This Week In AI

Google Genie

Google unveiled Genie, an AI that can turn text or image prompts into 2D video games.

It is the world's first text-to-interactive AI model that is learning how to create realistic virtual worlds.

Adobe AI Music

Adobe revealed that they are training an AI music/audio tool.

This will be a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions. When it launches, users will be able to adjust tempo, intensity, repeating patterns, and structure, extend tracks, and remix music all from one platform.

Large Language Models

In the context of architecture/design: Think of an LLM as a massive digital brain that's been fed a large amount of architectural and design knowledge – site plans, images, historical styles, landscape design principles, and material information.

This LLM now understands and stores this information. When prompted to do so, it can answer a question based on the specific data it has been trained on.

Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion all interact with an LLM to provide you with text or images.

Midjourney Example: Describe a "zen garden with a basalt water feature." Midjourney will tap into its data on zen gardens and basalt water to generate your image.

LLMs In The Design Process

As a designer, you know how to use different design techniques to get the best results for various projects. Similarly, with AI, you need to know how the data is trained and what it is trained on to find these “techniques”.

The Future of LLMs

Do you have a meeting that you need to organize, coordinate, and prepare summaries for afterward?

Here are some of the tasks you may be responsible for:

• Making a project schedule

• Sending meeting invites

• Creating a presentation

• Taking notes during meetings

• Summarizing notes after the meeting

• Sending meeting summaries

Some of these tasks are shorter than others but all require time.

LLMs have the ability to run a conversational AI chatbot that is connected to your own data and software, in this case helping you perform all of the tasks listed above when you prompt it to.

This LLM can be trained on past projects, documents, contacts, and relevant files.

Cohere is an AI company that makes LLMs built to be trained and deployed into specific industry products.

While our jobs as designers and project managers won't disappear, they will demand a significant change in how we approach daily responsibilities.

Exploring LLM’s

A platform like Hugging Face is a great place to browse the world of custom-trained models.

In an entirely different discipline like healthcare, there are tools like Suki.ai, an AI assistant that generates an average of $54,000 in increased revenue per user based on its features that help doctors save time automating simple tasks.

Large Language Models In Design Professions

LLMs are helpful tools that keep getting better. However, we might worry that AI will take our jobs because it can be cheaper and more efficient. This new technology could replace some traditional jobs, causing job worries and a move towards more automation instead of human creativity.

This is a reasonable prediction to have. LLMs are transforming design professions by enabling rapid design generation and management.

But the people who try out and use these tools will be the ones who can make positive changes. In the end, a substantial portion of the impacts of AI on design professions will be in the control of the professionals working within these industries.

AI Image of the week

Thank you for reading this week’s issue, check past issues here. Share this newsletter with colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in the combined world of architecture and artificial intelligence.

Until next Friday,

A.I.