Latent Space
🔬Why There Is No "AlphaFold for Materials" — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
March 24, 202635 min · 6,026 words
Show notes
Materials science is the unsung hero of the science world. Behind every physical product you interact was decades of research into getting the properties of materials just right. Your gym clothes contain synthetic fibers developed over decades. The glass screen, diodes, and chip substrate technology needed to read this blog post were only viable due to many teams of material scientists. Our guest Prof.
Highlighted moments
I just ask it, please design me a ligand that has 22 atoms. I can never get an answer that has 22 atoms.
“We have really good data sets out there for really boring chemistry.”
“every time someone comes out with kind of a new data set trained on a, and they call it a foundation potential foundation model, it looks really good. And then you get it into your lab and you say, okay, I want to use it for this problem I'm really excited about. And it starts doing kind of wacky things like molecules fall apart.”
“you can get the temperature at which a material will break down two ways. One, you can get it from the graph. And two, you can get it from what the authors say about how they interpret the graph. And those two things do not line up.”
Transcript
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