David Pichot · AI Architect and 3D Creative Technologist

AI Systems Architect

AI architect and creative technologist: I design systems where AI, real-time 3D and code work together, from prototype to product.

I am David Pichot, AI systems architect, looking for a job. After twenty years working with images, graphic design, 3D, sculpture, photography, I built my first virtual reality experiences on Unreal Engine. That is where I discovered what an algorithm was. For the past three years I have been designing increasingly complex cognitive systems, meant to be autonomous, alive, and portable anywhere.

Concretely, I can design and build end to end a conversational personal OS with long-term memory, agents and nocturnal learning; a control architecture for a physical robot still undergoing validation I designed, printed and wired, which perceives, decides and adapts its movements; a browser-based 3D editor with separate painting, rendering and simulation prototypes, and an assistant that writes and runs code inside the scene; a nodal architecture where autonomous components cooperate without a coordinator; a CMS driven by an agent that writes, lays out pages and handles SEO, the one generating this site; and tools that extend Cinema 4D to carry a rig from the software to the web, then to the machine.

The web fascinates me: most of my applications are ultra light, free of technical legacy, reachable from anywhere. Language and technology matter little; architecture and vision do.

The wall of cameras

The cameras follow your mouse.

A wall of cameras looking for movement.

Learn more : The wall of cameras

Intelligence as architecture

I do not see artificial intelligence as a model you install, but as a property that appears when perception, memory, state, decision and action form one coherent whole. Autonomous components, each an expert in its own field, sometimes set in tension. The language model is only one layer among others: useful for interpreting or phrasing, useless when a simpler mechanism already knows what to do. The scenes on this page, built with Genesis 3D, are an elementary form of this: each entity follows its own rules, none understands the whole, and a collective behavior appears.

The Echo robot

Rotate Echo in 3D, throw the ball to him, and watch how he reacts to the butterflies.

Rotate Echo with your finger, throw the ball to him, and watch how he reacts to the butterflies.

View the project : The Echo robot

How to read this site

Through this site, I want to show you my work, my ideas and the way I think about my craft. Every page exists in an audio version: the “Listen to this page” button sits under the title. Most visuals are interactive, try them: they are concrete demonstrations of my work. Owan, the site's assistant, is at the bottom left. She answers questions, tells anecdotes about the projects and gives a tour of the site. The Lab articles also exist as podcasts, in interview form.

The hand and the butterflies

The hand follows your mouse. The butterflies land if they want to.

The hand follows your finger. The butterflies land if they want to.

Learn more : The hand and the butterflies

My Philosophy

Intelligence does not necessarily lie in the power of the model. It lies in the quality of the data, the mechanics of attention and the architecture of the system. Behind every technical decision there is a way of understanding the problem: what you centralize or distribute, what you compute, learn, memorize or leave to the real world. The living is my reference: distributed, frugal, adaptable, coherent with no center controlling everything. Building is my way of thinking. I turn an intuition into observable mechanisms, then I watch what holds and what breaks.

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Genesis 3D · 3D editor and living systems lab

My Projects

My projects start with a concrete question and become durable systems.

How can autonomous components cooperate without a central coordinator? How do you give a system perception, a state, a memory, and let it decide with very little? How do you let a behavior emerge in a simulation, then entrust it to a real body?

None of them is a client product. Each one tests an idea until it holds or breaks, and what holds is reused in the next.

Each project page shows the system at work: scenes to handle, a robot to talk to, recorded demonstrations, and what broke along the way. See the projects

The Lab

Beyond code and deliverables, there are ideas in motion, questions, and discoveries. This blog is the workshop where I share my current thinking, a way to show how what I do is built.