Testing materials is the bottleneck after AI discovery

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 48:20

   I don't want to leave here without talking about the fact that you've discovered many new materials or potential materials. The stat I have here is known to humanity recently were 30,000 stable materials. You've discovered 2.2 million with a new AI program. Just dream a little bit because we don't know what all those materials can do. We don't know whether they'll be able to handle being out of like a frozen box or whatever. Dream materials for you to find in that set of new materials. Well I mean we're working really hard on materials to me it's like the next one of the next sort of big impacts we can have like the level of alpha fold really in biology, but this time in chemistry and materials.

2. 49:10

   you know i dream of a one day discovering a room temperature superconductor so what will that do because that's another big meme that people talk about so what do you yeah well it would help with the energy crisis and climate crisis because um if you had sort of cheap uh superconductors you know then you can transport energy from one place to another without any loss of that energy right so you could potentially put solar panels in the sahara desert and then just have a the the superconductor you know funneling that into Europe where it's needed at the moment you would just lose a ton of the power to heat and other things on the way so then you need other technologies like batteries and other things to store that because you can't you can't just pipe it to the place that you want without without without being incredibly inefficient so but also materials could

3. 49:54

   help with things like batteries to like but come up with the optimal battery I don't think we have the optimal battery designs that maybe we can do things like combination of materials and proteins, we can do things like carbon capture, you know, modify algae or other things to do carbon capture better than our artificial systems. I mean, even one of the most famous and most important chemical processes, the harbor process to make fertilizer and ammonia, you know, to take nitrogen out of the air was something that allows modern civilization but there might be many other chemical processes that could be catalyzed in that way if we knew what the right catalyst and the right material was so I think it's gonna be would be one of the most impactful technologies ever is to basically have in silico design of materials so we've

4. 50:48

   done step one of that where we showed we can come up with new stable materials but we need a way of testing the properties of those materials there's No lab can test 200,000, you know, tens of thousands of materials or millions of materials at the moment. So we have to, that's the hard part, is to do the testing. You think it's in there, the room temperature superconductor? I think, well, I heard that we actually think there are some superconductor materials.

5. 51:11

   I doubt they're room temperature ones, though. But I think at some point, if it's possible with physics, an AI system will one day find it. So that's one use.