AI and the future shape of product design

These days we talk so much about artificial intelligence and its creators that it's easy to overlook the increasingly prolific role AI itself is playing in product creation and design. Across different industries, the technical and the creative are being drawn closely together to create a range of products that may otherwise never have been conceived. Take, for example, the new aerodynamic bicycle presented this month at the International Conference on Machine Learning, which was designed using Neural Concept software. By employing AI in the design phase, a small team from French college IUT Annecy were able to completely bypass the usual methods of testing for aerodynamism – a process that usually requires a great deal of time and computing power. Instead of engineers having to conceive and then simulator-test several different iterations of bicycle design, the technology simply took specifications for length and width, and then rapidly swept through an array of different shapes to determine which was most optimal.