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?
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.