Category: AI for Science

Start with a number: roughly 1060. That’s a conservative estimate of the number of drug-like molecules that could theoretically exist. The entire history of pharmaceutical chemistry has explored maybe 108 of them. We have been, by any honest accounting, searching a beach by examining individual grains of sand. That situation is changing fast, and the…

The lithium-ion battery sitting in your phone took roughly four decades of incremental chemistry to reach its current energy density. AI researchers at Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory compressed a comparable materials search into 80 hours. That number deserves to sit with you for a moment. The specific result — a lithium-sodium mixed…