From 15 hours to one minute: How AI/ML is speeding up GM's development
Ars Technica AI · Jonathan M. Gitlin · 2026-06-01
Ars Technica profiles General Motors CPO Sterling Anderson, who describes how AI and machine learning are enabling a third epoch of engineering at GM that compresses development timelines dramatically, with some tasks reduced from 15 hours to one minute.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-in-manufacturingautomotive-aigmengineering-acceleration
Claims
- GM CPO Sterling Anderson characterizes AI/ML as enabling a third epoch of engineering that supersedes centuries of slow empirical iterative design.
- AI is reportedly reducing certain GM engineering development tasks from 15 hours to one minute.
- Historical engineering relied on guess-and-check iteration from observed prototypes, a method AI-accelerated computation is now replacing with computation-guided design.
Key quotes
There was a time when humans looked at birds and were like, 'OK, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let's go and design something that looks like them.' — Sterling Anderson
And by that I mean humans largely started with what we know or had seen, built prototypes of something that kind of looked like it and maybe tweaked some things, hoping to make it perform better, tested it, iterated, and kind of went through this slow guess-and-check process until we got to something that marginally worked. — Sterling Anderson