From 15 hours to 1 minute: How AI/ML is accelerating GM development

When we met Sterling Anderson in 2024was head of marketing at Aurora, a self-driving car startup he founded in 2016 after several years at Tesla. Just over a year ago, Anderson left the original world for something else, taking the position of chief operating officer at General Motors, the nation’s largest automaker. Since then, he has seen clearly how GM is entering the third era of technology and design.

“People used to look at birds and say, ‘Well, those wings look like they’re working really well, let’s go and make something like those birds,'” Anderson said, describing the early years of engineering. “And they just repeated their way to something that wasn’t possible.”

The first few centuries of creation “were a time of constant development and engineering,” he said. “And I mean people basically started with what we knew or what they saw, they made prototypes that looked like them and maybe changed some things, and hoped it would work, tested it, iterated, and kind of went through it step by step and thought step by step until we got to something that worked a little bit.”

The second generation began when computers became more powerful to handle some of the original tasks. “We started to see development tools, in very real ways, changing the jobs that people had done to keep them from going to power development,” Anderson said.

“For example, we started to see CFD (computational fluid dynamics) starting to inform aircraft designers,” he said. “We saw a lot of other weapons…