This AI can think like an engineer—and it just designed a spaceship engine

Looking at all the stuff surrounding Lin Kayser in his Dubai office, it’s easy to assume he’s a rocket scientist working on a spaceship to escape Earth’s gravity. Drawings, plans, and prototypes seemingly stolen from an interstellar alien probe frame Kayser on Zoom. But the cofounder of Leap 71 is no rocket scientist—even if he looks like he could play one in a movie. “We are fundamentally a software company,” Kayser tells me. “We’re building a computational model that can...