I’ve gone down a rabbit hole here.
I’ve been looking at lk99, the potential room temp superconductor, lately. Then I came across an AI chat and decided to test it. I then asked it to propose a room temp superconductor and it suggested (NdBaCaCuO)_7(SrCuO_2)_2 and a means of production which got me thinking. It’s just a system for looking at patterns and answering the question. I’m not saying this has made anything new, but it seems to me eventually a chat AI would be able to suggest a new material fairly easily.
Has AI actually discovered or invented anything outside of it’s own computer industry and how close are we to it doing stuff humans haven’t done before?
The AI most regular people are using, you can think of as better at sifting the sea of data to find what you are looking for, and discussing it with you in a more understandable way.
The breakthroughs with AI are often computer programs that are told to look for an answer and change themselves somewhat randomly, but with many, many copies trying the task. The ones that fail are deleted, and the most successful change up again. This is repeated until you reliably get your result.
You wouldn’t use an LLM (chat bot to appear human) for finding new materials, you’d specialize it with physical and chemical data and give it technically requirements. Something similar is done via AI for genome sequencing. AI is also used to design complex structures that are hard for humans to get their heads behind, like a new structure of a CPU. AI can also create new art, but depending on the model, similar to how humans do it, it will take more inspiration or less from already existing works. AI is not completely new, as we’ve used machine learning to filter stuff via pattern or finding anomalies for decades. It just never was this easy to train your own model and generate usable results.
A real AI would have explained you that with great probability a room temperature (and atmospheric pressure) superconductor is not possible.
Few experiments were successful with small grains tested under enormous pressures. But apart from that a room temperature superconductor is unlikely due to the high entropy.
Define AI.
Machine learning, image processing and similar “AI” techniques have been used for decades in sciences. When a telescope does large field survey to detect an transient phenomena like a supernova, you don’t have an astrophysicist looking at the photo, a smart astrophysicist (well several ones) used image processing and machine learning to teach the computer that there is something interesting on the image and send an automated message to every telescope about : Something is happening at this position so they can watch it immediately. Is it AI ?
What about the LHC who takes so much data that they need very advanced algorithm to store them and process them, is that AI ? What about protein folding which is a very complex problem relying on machine learning to find the proper solution
The big and recent breakthrough is that it’s now accessible on an ordinary computer and that the training of large model is cheap enough to use it for less complicated topics
