Google DeepMind Discovers "800 Years' Worth Of Knowledge"

DeepMind, a Google subsidiary, has claimed that it has unlocked "800 years' worth of knowledge" after discovering 2.2 million new crystals. In a blog post, Google DeepMind said 380,000 of these are stable materials that could power future technologies, ranging from next-generation computer chips and batteries to solar panels. The discovery was made by state-of-the-art neural network tool called GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration), DeepMind said, adding that a study about it has been published in the prestigious journal Nature.

"With GNoME, we've multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles," Amil Merchant and Ekin Dogus Cubuk said in the blog post.

They also said that using GNoME bypassed centuries of "painstaking experimentation" that would have been required to discover the new materials.

"GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale... We hope that GNoME and other AI tools can help revolutionise materials discovery today and shape the future of the field," the blog post said.

It pointed out that external researchers tested DeepMind's breakthrough by creating 736 of the new materials discovered by GNoME.

DeepMind is an artificial intelligence technology that uses machine learning to solve problems that computers haven't traditionally been able to tackle.

Its technology spread rapidly and is currently used in several real-world applications.

The company began as a London-based start-up in 2010 and was acquired by Google in 2014. It's now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.