Update on this paper from last year on AI in scientific discovery. MIT put out a press release: "no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data...[or] veracity of the research." "The author is no longer at MIT."
Some initial thoughts. The original paper was too good to be true in many ways. How could a 2nd year PhD student get pervasive access to extremely sensitive data from what must have been a multi billion dollar company?
How could such a study have been set up years before this student started his work PhD, in just the right way to deliver results to him?
What company really has 1000 scientists all trying to discover new materials all day every day? It didn't really make sense as a concept.
But there were technical points too. AI, using atomistic methods like DFT, cannot predict most of the types of materials that were supposedly studied. It can only really work for simple crystalline materials. Glasses, biomaterials? No chance.
Even many crystalline materials throw up very significant challenges for materials prediction. And as for properties? Promising recent progress with tools like MatterGen and MatterSim, but prediction of a wide range of properties of new materials with AI is still extremely hard
If MIT are right in their press release, it seems the whole thing may have been fabricated. Why people do that is anyone's guess. I recently listened to the author be interviewed on several podcasts, and in academic forums.
He seemed convincing, but honestly the clues were there from early on. I feel this would never have got past peer review at a journal, and perhaps that's where this all came unstuck.
As AI bridges disciplines, and promises to reshape science in so many ways, it easier than ever to shun scepticism, which is a central plank of the scientific method.
Thanks to @stuartbuck1 and @hsu_steve for interesting conversations on this paper back when it was published.
Good thread here: https://x.com/bradchattergoon/...
Listen to a podcast with the paper author (from before recent revelations) https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/...
And another good blog post, going into detail on the materials science, and why it can't have been correct https://x.com/BenShindel/statu...