Google’s leading artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, claims to have unlocked “800 years’ worth of knowledge” by discovering 2.2 million new crystals. DeepMind states that the materials found in the research can be used to transform industries and also open up entirely new avenues for future discoveries.
Of the 2.2 million crystals, about 380,000 are reported to have a structure stable enough to develop next-generation technologies, from better electric car batteries to superconductors in ultra-efficient computers.
To discover these crystals, DeepMind developed a state-of-the-art neural network tool called GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration).
DeepMind researchers Amil Merchant and Ekin Doğuş Çubuk wrote in a blog post that they bypassed the centuries-long “painstaking experiments” required to discover new materials by using GNoME. “With GNoME, we have multiplied the number of technologically available materials known to humanity,” the researchers stated.
GNoME demonstrates the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale… We hope that GNoME and other AI tools will revolutionize today’s materials discovery and help shape the future of the field.
Outside researchers tested DeepMind’s invention by independently creating 736 of the new materials GNoME discovered. “These candidates include materials that have the potential to advance the transformative technologies of the future, from superconductors that power supercomputers to next-generation batteries that will increase the efficiency of electric vehicles,” the blog post stated.
The research was detailed in the study titled “Scaling deep learning for materials discovery” published in the scientific journal Nature.
The researchers behind the new tool said it could “reach unprecedented levels of generalization, increasing the efficiency of materials discovery by an order of magnitude.”
Others not involved in the research describe GNoME as the “ChatGPT of chemistry,” referring to the hugely popular AI chatbot that launched exactly a year ago.
“Scientific discovery is the next frontier in artificial intelligence,” says Carla Gomes, Co-Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Science at Cornell University, who was not involved in the research.
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