AI in the News - January 2024

Robotics is a branch of engineering and science that involves the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Robots are machines capable of carrying out complex tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously, often mimicking or replicating human actions. How does that help construction?

Calling them “exciting and also scary times” for the construction industry and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), Michael Colapietro, CEO and co-founder, Smartapp urged attendees of a recent webinar to leverage AI to “help us reimagine” how to improve construction operations across the board. And he shares what AI really stands for. 

What's going on in the News? Well, generative AI hallucinates (despite its inability to ingest mushrooms). But once the problem was recognized, technologists have been taking steps to reduce hallucinations. In generative AI, “hallucinating” means, in essence, making up sometimes-fantastic answers, like a sixth grader who didn’t read the book for their report. Or a politician. There are still some things only humans can do ...

In my quest to learn more about generative AI, I stumbled on the "This Day in AI" Podcast in which two brothers humorously discuss AI. The two are software developers who use AI in their work. They have also developed a web application called Simtheory that helps generative AI users interact productively with AI.

Welcome to the first installment of Part 3 of our eBook series 'AI-Powered Construction Management.' Here, our focus will be on three pivotal components of project management: project purpose, project aim, and strategic objective. Understanding these foundational elements is essential for any construction project, as they guide the direction, execution, and ultimate success of the endeavor.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a valuable way. NLP enables the interaction between humans and computers through language.

A scan of the news shows an industry adopting and adapting AI even as some of the hype subsides. Nevertheless, it’s clear that AI can help the construction industry in important ways, particularly regarding the management of the huge amounts of data involved in construction. Here's a glimpse of what's going on. 

I’ve got a confession. Most of the time, I find a lot of what we do in safety boring. It isn’t that the work is boring. I consider myself lucky to have landed in a profession I honestly like. No, it’s just that many practices, activities, and even sometimes the language around the practice of safety can be ... mundane.

AI Hype has been everywhere you look for the past 12 – 18 months, even as it relates to that bastion of technical conservatism, construction. Gartner, Inc., the American technological research and consulting firm, tracks new technologies through its Hype Cycle. In the context of the construction industry, where do generative and other AI technologies fall on the Gartner Hype Cycle? Plus news headlines ...

Humans have a tendency toward what Alan Greenspan famously called “irrational exuberance.” Coined in the dot-com era, the exuberance is back with AI. The rapid advance and general availability of generative AI, with early hands-on experiences, has once again spurred visions of a magical future automated by AI. And while various applications are underway, challenges remain. 

Developed over the past 15 years of reviewing construction CPM schedules on major projects, the Construction Schedule Reviewer (CSR) helps busy project managers and schedulers prepare monthly updates and schedule narratives.  Part and parcel of CSR is the ability to read MS Project and Primavera schedules, document schedule progress sources and prepare presentation summary charts and graphs.  Additionally, CSR will use in-house trained AI models to write the schedule narrative for the update report.

For those who follow Artificial Intelligence news, the release of a new model from OpenAI has been a long time coming. Rumours about OpenAI’s “Strawberry” model have been stirring for months, and finally, paid users have access to two new models: o1-mini and o1 preview.