With the wave of rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, intelligent technology has provided new ideas and means for the study of aerodynamics. Many useful explorations and attempts have been made by scholars in various countries on the integrated application of artificial intelligence and aerodynamic design. Artificial intelligence methods have been used in key parts of aerodynamic design including description of design objects, numerical solution, and nonlinear mapping. Adaptive design parameter exploration, efficient aerodynamic characteristic solving, fast data dimensionality reduction and mapping, and intelligent optimization have been realized to improve the speed, accuracy, robustness and global performance of aerodynamic design. The development of aerodynamic design, the research status of artificial intelligence technology and the application of machine learning in aerodynamic design were introduced in this paper. The prospect of applying deep learning to aerodynamic design was discussed, the concept of highly intelligent machine namely “machine design” based aerodynamic design, which relies on machine to adjust the optimization strategy was proposed, and the significance of con-ducting research on intelligent interpretable design was emphasized.