Liverpool team uses AI for battery breakthrough - The Engineer
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Researchers at the University of Liverpool have used AI tools to aid the discovery of a new solid-state material that rapidly conducts lithium ions.
  • @mikezaneEnglish
    4•10 months ago

    I am not a very knowledgeable person in this; but to my understanding, ai figured out a new molecule that can be used in batteries. Does this include any information on how to make it or is that the job of the scientists and engineers from this point forward? And if so, it sounds like an insanely difficult process.

    Or I could be totally wrong in my understanding.

    • @AlteonOPMEnglish
      4•10 months ago

      No info on how to actually manufacture it. However. It shouldn’t be difficult for a Chem.E to offer a process to manufacture. Still extremely preliminary, however the idea of AI being used to develope brand new materials to solve problems is going to be a game changer in the field of materials engineering.

      • @rdyoungEnglish
        2•10 months ago

        How is this any different than what boinc and others have been doing for decades with drug research? I’m seriously getting tired of AI being used for everything that isn’t actually AI.

        • @AlteonOPMEnglish
          2•10 months ago

          AI is highly important as it can take in a massive amount of information and find trends that people likely can’t. Especially in R&D applications, AI is going to be almost necessary to keep up with the pace of other developments in other fields. Smart materials in particular are going to see a boom with the advent of smarter AI.

          • @rdyoungEnglish
            1•10 months ago

            You’re still using AI as a buzzword. None of what is being attributed to AI is actually AI. This is the kind of thing that distributed computing has been doing for decades. Advances in processing power and code efficiency have made things easier but it’s still not AI.

            Again I’ll ask. How is this different from boinc, etc?

            Here is an article from Amazon about distributed computing that doesn’t use AI incorrectly or at all.

            https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/distributed-computing/#:~:text=Distributed computing is the method,to deal with complex challenges.

            • @[email protected]English
              4•10 months ago

              Distributed computing is completely unrelated. That’s just running a program across many computers.

              AI is the simulation of intelligence. The main one people know is a neural network.

              The code they run it is very simple. It’s just a series of nodes that apply a weight to their input and pass it to connected nodes. Basically just multiplication and compared to a threshold.

              But what that simple code is able to achieve once trained is so much more than its code. That’s the key. The same way everything we experience is just our neurons firing.

              AIs ave figured out how to calculate the positions of planets in the future from training data in the past. Which means figuring out the scientific equations needed to calculate that.

              So AI can potentially figure out equations that we don’t even know as long as input and output data is available.

              They are experimenting with this for the magnetic fields that contain fusion reactions. The AI can spot patterns in the data indicating a breach that we don’t understand.

              You can’t just write a program to do that.

  • @MeanEYEEnglish
    1•10 months ago

    At this point we have a breakthrough a month when it comes to batteries. It’s best we don’t get our hopes up. When it hits the market, then it’s a breakthrough, like battery in new Honor Magic v2. It’s quite a bit thinner than anything competition uses, but still packs quite a bit of power.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•10 months ago

      People always say stuff like this but battery tech has consistently increased at a pretty rapid pace.