Chatbots that are trained on a set of human-generated writing samples and can reply to prompts with sentences and even paragraphs that mimic their training, have become familiar to most users of the internet. One of these models, ChatGPT, is familiar enough that it’s how most people understand large language models (LLM) that seemingly learn, comprehend, and then generate language. But these models also may carry great promise for the physical sciences, including applied mechanics.

That’s the premise of a paper written by a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara; University of New Hampshire; and Northwestern University. “These emergent capabilities are exciting for science because they vastly lower the barrier to effective scientific data mining,” they wrote in “Perspective: Large Language Models in Applied Mechanics.” The article appeared in the October 2023 issue of the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics.