The universe of potential materials is vast. To get a sense for just how big it is consider the following: we want to combine three different elements (drawn from a subset of the periodic table of say only 10 elements) into a new material. A naive first estimation would be that we have 10x10x10 = 1000 candidates to consider. But wait, we can choose to have varying amounts of each element in the material. Again just to get a sense, simply assume that we can have between 1 and 100 units of the element in our material. All of the sudden we see that we have 10^3 10^3 10^3 = 1 billion possible materials.

Because the space is so vast, humanity to date has synthesized a tiny fraction of all possible materials. Much of what works so far is the result of lucky accidents combined with brute force exploration. Thankfully we now have AI to assist us. One way to think about the superpower of AI is that it can discover structures in high dimensional spaces. For us humans the world is only directly accessible through the 4 dimensions of our perception, which makes imagining and discovering structures in higher dimensions really challenging. AIs do not face this limitation. 

The team at alqem is setting out to use this power of AI to find magnetic materials that do not need rare earths to be powerful. With most transportation going electric and billions of robots on the way, the demand for electric motors and actuators is exploding. Figuring out how to make the necessary magnets from cheap and abundant elements will be a major unlock.

The alqem team has a great background for taking on this challenge. They built the largest open materials data set before embarking on this mission and have pulled in leading researchers in the field. The AI models they are building propose candidate materials, the team synthesizes these, and the results, most of which no one else has ever measured, feed back to make the next round of predictions sharper. This loop generates proprietary data which builds a compounding advantage as the models improve.

You can find a lot more detail on them and their approach in their own post. We are excited to be backing them in this quest. Alqem is actively hiring.

You can read their announcement here.