Another week, another startup working on engineering artificial general intelligence.
You’re reading Engineering Paper. For the second week in a row, I present a startup claiming to build an engineering artificial general intelligence.
P-1 AI has emerged from stealth with $23 million in seed funding and “a mission to solve engineering AGI,” according to co-founder Aleksa Gordić.
“We are building an AI architecture that can generalize and scale to an engineering superintelligence for physical system design,” Gordić said in the company’s inaugural press release.
Like any good AI startup, the company gave a name to their budding superintelligence: Archie. It’s an AI agent that “performs engineering tasks just like a human engineer, distilling key design drivers from requirements, coming up with product concepts and derivatives, doing first order design trades, and selecting and utilizing the right engineering tools for detailed design.”
P-1 AI envisions Archie acting as a junior engineer at “every major industrial company,” according to co-founder and CEO Paul Eremenko, “focusing initially on the dull and repetitive tasks, enhancing the team’s bandwidth and productivity, learning from real-world feedback and data, getting smarter and smarter, and ultimately helping humankind build things we don’t know how to build today.”
The startup takes that last claim quite seriously, as you can see in the Archie demo hype reel (their description, not mine). It’s a bizarre video that begins with an Ayn Rand quote and ends with a sassy Archie designing Dyson spheres and Matrioshka brains, star-surrounding megastructures straight out of science fiction.
Sci-fi aside, P-1 AI says that Archie will be deployed later this year in the somewhat less spectacular domain of data center cooling systems. From there Archie will expand to other domains “including industrial systems, building systems, automotive and heavy machinery, and aerospace and defense.”
I like P-1 AI’s audacity, but it’s hard to take the company seriously. It doesn’t seem to take itself seriously, with the adolescent demo reel, single-page green text website, and name taken from a 1977 sci-fi novel about an AI that goes rogue and blows up a U.S. military facility. I guess Skynet and HAL were already taken.
Quick hits
- The ongoing battle between Autodesk and its shareholders has come to something of a truce. Autodesk has appointed two independent directors to its board, Jeff Epstein and Christie Simons, as part of a cooperation agreement with Starboard Value LP, the hedge fund that published a letter in March decrying “Autodesk’s long history of financial and operational underperformance.”
- SketchUp has launched the Design Sprint Challenge, a competition in which SketchUp users try to design a 500 square foot space that “betters sustainability or community.” The winner will get $5,000 and a one-year subscription to SketchUp Studio. Submissions close on June 11, 2025, and you can enter here.
- Comsol announced the keynote lineup for its May 1 online event, Comsol Day: Simulation Apps & Digital Twins, including speakers from AltaSim Technologies, Boston Scientific, Littelfuse and more.
- Nemetschek Group subsidiary Allplan released the latest version of its BIM platform, Allplan 2025-1. The release includes Structural Analysis Format (SAF) integration and a new cloud-based license management system, among other updates. In other Nemetschek news, the Group announced a partnership with Google Cloud to “accelerate AI-driven innovation, expand into new markets, and enhance digital workflows across its portfolio.”
One last link
Ever wonder how CERN stays on top of the Large Hadron Collider? (I’m talking preventative maintenance, not preventing spontaneous black holes.) Engineering.com contributor Lionel Grealou explains in Managing the world’s most complex machine.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.
