An AI Dreamed Up 380,000 New Materials. The Next Challenge Is Making Them

The robotic line cooks were deep in their recipe, toiling away in a room tightly packed with equipment. In one corner, an articulated arm selected and mixed ingredients, while another slid back and forth on a fixed track, working the ovens. A third was on plating duty, carefully shaking the contents of a crucible onto a dish. Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, nodded approvingly as a robotic arm delicately pinched and capped an empty plastic vial--an especially tricky task, and one of his favorites to observe. "These guys can work all night," Ceder said, giving two of his grad students a wry look.