Is This a Potential Direction for Technological Development?

Image of a Boeing aircraft. (AI-generated image)

[People News] By 2025, the startup LEAP 71 (https://leap71.com), based in Dubai, had gained immense popularity. Founded in 2023, LEAP 71 is a two-person company run by a couple, focusing on AI engine design. The company's key asset is the Noyron large-scale computational engineering model, which was developed through the couple's collaborative efforts. This foundational computational model in engineering is a product of their unique blend of knowledge. It combines aerospace engineer Mrs Josefine's expertise in propulsion systems, thermal management, fluid routing, and structural mechanics, along with the principles of logic, physics, and manufacturing processes. Additionally, it incorporates the skills of veteran programmer Mr Lin Kayser in software design architecture, coding, computational mathematics, and machine vision, all integrated with artificial intelligence.

What has contributed to their immense popularity? It is the engine developed based on their Noyron design, which is strikingly similar in appearance to human or animal organs and tissues, and its functions mirror those of these biological structures, eliciting astonishment and exclamations from many observers. Additionally, its performance far surpasses expectations, leading many to feel that it is groundbreaking. Furthermore, it diverges significantly from design concepts that have been established for decades, leaving many puzzled as to why this is the case.

The underlying reason stems from a different way of thinking. The couple believes that, although information technology has made continuous progress under Moore's Law over the years, many changes in our physical world have been surprisingly minimal over the past few decades. By discarding traditional thought and design principles and leveraging the powerful computational capabilities of modern computers and AI, they have miniaturised the fundamental modelling units. The open-source core of the Noyron system, known as PicoGK, serves as a micro geometric unit management core. It is this micro geometric unit, the Pico Geometry Kernel, that has instigated all these changes.

For a long time, the computer industrial design field has employed methods of geometric unit miniaturisation, primarily aimed at achieving smoother and more aesthetically pleasing visual results that align with mechanical design principles. Similarly, finite element analysis embodies the idea of serving the whole through localised approaches. However, biomimicry has yet to reach such a fine level of granularity. In contrast, the couple's concept reverses this approach by first deconstructing the design into fundamental building blocks and defining how these components interact through clear and logical dependencies. At this stage, the emphasis is not on the aesthetics of mechanisation but on each micro-core, capturing essential rules: functional requirements, physical constraints, manufacturability, and performance standards. Remarkably, the performance requirements for rocket engines that NASA has struggled to meet for decades have been achieved by slightly modifying the combinations of these basic units at a marginally more microscopic level.

As current technology and craftsmanship inch closer to the microscopic scale, existing physical laws suggest that we should shift towards designing biological organisms. Is it somewhat ironic? Many people today passionately follow the unattractive silicon-based life forms, while these silicon-based entities seem to subtly guide some individuals in their quest to replicate the structure of carbon-based life in our world. After all, they understand better than humans that the structure of all things in this world, particularly the human body, possesses exceptional capabilities far beyond human comprehension; unfortunately, humans do not know how to utilise them correctly.

(First published in People News)△