OpenAI Shares How ChatGPT and Codex Help Engineers With Mechanical Design, Electrical Engineering and Simulation
ChatGPT and Codex are helping engineers build for the physical world. We’re sharing our progress across mechanical design, electrical engineering, and simulation—from helping our hardware teams iterate faster to testing new workflows with industry collaborators.
Context
If AI tools speed up physical engineering, not just software, the time to build devices, robots and data center gear could shrink.
OpenAI is building its own consumer devices and has been hiring hardware engineers. Codex is its coding agent and ChatGPT its main assistant. The company posted a video with the announcement on its main X account.
Deep dive
OpenAI (@OpenAI) posted on Nov 3 that ChatGPT and Codex are helping engineers build for the physical world. The company said it is sharing its progress across mechanical design, electrical engineering and simulation, from helping its own hardware teams iterate faster to testing new workflows with industry collaborators.
The post came with a video and passed 340,000 views within a few hours. It does not name the industry collaborators or give numbers on how much faster the hardware teams work, so the size of the gains is not stated in the post.
The move matters because most of the proven gains from AI agents so far are in software. Mechanical and electrical design rely on specialised tools for CAD, circuit layout and simulation, and on long cycles of building and testing prototypes. If a model can write simulation scripts, check designs and suggest changes, it could cut the number of slow physical iterations.
The announcement lands on the same day as a report, relayed by Walter Bloomberg from The Information, that Anthropic engineers found Claude cuts chip design time. Together the two stories show the leading labs pointing their models at hardware, both for their own products and as a new market for their tools.
OpenAI's own hardware work, including the consumer device it has been developing, gives it a direct reason to test these workflows internally first.
What to expect next
Watch for named partners, case studies with measured time savings, and any new Codex or ChatGPT features built for CAD, circuit design or simulation tools. A product or partnership aimed at engineering firms would show OpenAI treating physical engineering as a business line. Rivals such as Anthropic and Google are likely to publish their own hardware results, and engineering software vendors may respond with deeper AI integrations.