The convergence of additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence with LLMs for smart product design

The development of smart product design through the integration of additive manufacturing (AM) and artificial intelligence (AI) has become a game changer in the production value chain of Industry 4.0. This is premised on today’s trend of moving away from mechanical technologies to digitization processes driven by AI. This trend has harnessed an AI-driven intelligent approach in creating new avenues for manufacturing process and system optimization in the era of Industry 4.0 and the emerging Industry 5.0. Conversely, there are concerns about how AI-driven design optimization can improve product manufacturability and performance. Thus, this study discusses the key processes, challenges, and opportunities in integrating AM and AI for smart product design. The study further suggests the possible utilization of the recent large language models (LLMs) and customized robots as designers to enable AM capabilities for optimizing smart product design and product performance, reducing production time, and possibly producing more product units at a much lower cost, instead of employing AM only. With the aid of this study and the AM-AI with LLMs taxonomy outlined, the convergence shows promising potential in synthesizing intelligent and smart product designs.