AI versus Marshy - Building New Materials with AI

G’day! I’m Marshy, a growth marketer with a conscience, and welcome to this article about the exciting world of AI. If you’re new here, don’t worry – I’ll catch you up on the context. I’ve been exploring the intersection of AI and real-world applications in my newsletter, and today I want to share with you a fascinating breakthrough in creating new materials with AI. Google’s DeepMind is a project that started in 2010 seeking to build general AI systems with an interdisciplinary approach. This means moving outside traditional tech realms - software, connectivity, interfaces - and into areas less explored… Like creating new freaking materials from scratch. ​ MIT Technology Review reports on the breakthrough (via Nature). Sometimes I pretend I know what I’m talking about - and yeah I am not doing that with this image GNoME is their AI tool that predicts the structures for new materials. Think of the elemental table, and then think of all the possible combinations and permutations possible to create materials. Building all of these is currently impossible. GNoME seems to be able to simulate new structures of materials by combining millions of combinations that “work” (2.2m) and of these - 700 new materials have moved forward into lab stages for testing and working with. The goal of testing is stability - and thanks to this tool and combined with robotic arms - the amount of stable materials that “exist” - has increased almost tenfold. – When we try and wrap our head around AI - it’s often easy to get sucked into this nifty tool, or being able to talk to an agent. The real meaty use cases couldn’t be further from that world. Creating new THINGS is a possibility thanks to tech like this. Another example of simulations for real-world impact is “digital twinning” which I first mentioned in #14, and was an example of the kinds of projects my old engineering client worked on. Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy #25: from scratch, calendar hack, and more accessible coding