LLMs Fail at Spatial and Mechanical Reasoning for Physical Product Design
Engineers using top-tier LLMs for mechanical design brainstorming find the models cannot reason accurately about 3D spatial relationships, clamping mechanisms, or manufacturability, producing plausible-sounding but physically implausible suggestions. This reveals a consistent gap between language-based reasoning and the spatial/physical reasoning needed for real hardware engineering work, regardless of which model is used.
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