I’ve gone down a rabbit hole here.
I’ve been looking at lk99, the potential room temp superconductor, lately. Then I came across an AI chat and decided to test it. I then asked it to propose a room temp superconductor and it suggested (NdBaCaCuO)_7(SrCuO_2)_2 and a means of production which got me thinking. It’s just a system for looking at patterns and answering the question. I’m not saying this has made anything new, but it seems to me eventually a chat AI would be able to suggest a new material fairly easily.
Has AI actually discovered or invented anything outside of it’s own computer industry and how close are we to it doing stuff humans haven’t done before?
It’s important to be clear what kind of actual system you’re using when you say “AI”.
If you’re talking about something like ChatGPT, you’re using an LLM, or “Large Language Model”. Its goal is to produce something that reasonably looks like a human wrote it. It has reviewed a ridiculous amount of human text, and has a metric assload of weights associating the relationships between these words.
If the LLM sees your question and associates a particular compound with superconductors, it’s because it’s seen these things related in other writings (directly or indirectly) or at least sees the relationship as plausible.
It’s important not to ascribe more intent behind what your seeing than exists. It can’t understand what a superconductor is or how materials can achieve the state, it’s just really good at relaying related words in a convincing manner
That’s not to say it isn’t cool or useful, or that ML(Machine Learning) can’t be used to help find answers to these kinds of questions.