With the help of scientists
Artificial intelligence in its current form — It's not just about drawing pictures, creating code and writing texts. It is also actively used in science. And Microsoft decided to show the capabilities of its platform by creating a new material using AI, which potentially has great prospects for creating batteries.
In its work, Microsoft teamed up with scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The company invited scientists to use its Azure Quantum Elements (AQE) platform, designed for work in the field of chemistry and materials science. Specialists «appealed» to AI with the task of creating battery materials that use less lithium.
Initially, the AI offered 32 million different options. After that, the artificial intelligence system had to determine which of these materials would be stable enough to use, and there were about 500,000 of them left.
Next, the scientists, by refining their queries tasked the AI to determine how well each material can conduct energy, model how atoms and molecules move inside each material, and figure out how practical each option would be from a point of view in terms of commercialization.
After all the calculations, only 23 materials remained, of which five were already known to scientists. That is, AI has actually created 18 new materials that have the potential for development and implementation.
The uniqueness of the entire experiment is that all the work took scientists and AI only 80 hours.
Moreover, after this, scientists synthesized one of the materials created by AI, and even made a prototype battery. True, there are no results yet. But we do know that this is a material that combines lithium and sodium in some form, and this option uses 70% less lithium than current batteries.