Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates

Ygg2

Ugh. Unless this has been actually experimentally verified to be a room-temperature and room-pressure superconductor, it's about as ground breaking as "Yet another promising nuclear fusion candidate theoretically described."

vatsachak

I could have gotten this in one prompt lmao

rfgplk

Current frontier LLMs empower effectively anyone with limitless knowledge. Historically, if I wanted to hire an engineer to, say, create something like this I would have needed a multi-million dollar budget. Now, anyone with $200 (or less) can achieve it.

dev_l1x_be

I am not sure how this process looks like. When they "discover" these, what are they actually doing? The agents ran quantum-mechanical simulations of each crystal with the standard method for this, density functional theory, at two levels of approximation: a faster one (PBE+U) and a slower, usually more accurate one (HSE06). The band gaps and spin windows below come from the more accurate one. So the agent runs a classic simulation or I am missing something.

scrlk

After the LK-99 debacle, I'm taking this with a truck load of salt.

xgulfie

Anyone remember LK99 lol

Legend2440

Interesting; but until actually made and tested, not worth getting excited over.

postepowanieadm

Discovered in whose data?

matthova

Sounds interesting. Excited to see physical versions of this cooked up. Also, very excited for a world a few years from now where we can talk about accomplishments like this from the frame of the driver of the AI, rather than hype that AI helped.

colijobles

While we should be skeptical until made in a lab or verified by others, this is a much better use of LLMs than solving math theorems/conjectures

jonplackett

A lot of these ‘an agent invented’ or ‘an agent solved’ are actually the agent wading through a lot of info and finding something a human did that no one noticed or saw the relevance of at the time. If ai becomes so prolific that we humans all stop doing those things then will they still work?

nico

In a way, you can think of pretty much anything we express with language, especially things that are already modeled in scientific language, or logical language, or in equations or code; to be representable in a parametric/searchable space Thus, you can build ai/ml models+agents to explore those spaces, at a speed and scope much larger than what any human can do I can imagine findings like these are going to keep increasing in frequency to a point in which the bar for novelty goes a lot higher

randbyte

Who is vals.ai and why they keep submitting eye-catching claims. A few weeks ago they said fable 5.1 solved some obscure cipher and now opus 5.5 found room temperature semiconductor candidates. Meanwhile they seem to be in the business of making benchmarks. Are they a promoter / influencer for Anthropic?

einpoklum

This should probably read: "Researchers discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates. They used Opus 5.5 agents to perform some checks."

tedsanders

> We’re all used to two types of magnet. The common one, the fridge magnet, is ferromagnetic — its atomic magnets all point the same way (up or down), adding their magnetic effects. The less well known one, the antiferromagnet (AF), has neighbouring atomic magnets that point opposite ways and exactly cancel out magnetically. This is a very bizarre introduction. People encounter diamagnets (e.g., copper) and paramagnets (e.g., aluminum) way more than they encounter antiferromagnets. I don't know why you'd ever cast magnetism as a false binary between ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, without acknowledging any other types of magnetic order. (I did a PhD in magnetic materials) Edit: I'll add that whether an antiferromagnet is useful, say, for exchange biasing a ferromagnetic thin film, depends on many factors. Just looking at antiferromagnetism alone you've got collinear vs non-collinear, G-type vs A-type vs C-type, commensurate vs incommensurate, and isotropic vs anisotropic; and all of that interacts with the interface structure, yada yada yada. It would be helpful if the authors elaborated on the expected properties of these materials. I personally don't know what people want room-temperature magnetic semiconductors for, but I'd be curious to learn what set of properties they think would be useful.

lifeisloving

The people who wrote this seem to be lacking in expertise, and its just a model benchmarking company..Whos every article is just hyperbole about llms. Not sure why we're calling it a discovery, when they've literally been made before, by a human.

otterley

I wouldn't describe them both as being newly-discovered. The second one, KV[Cr(CN)₆], had already been discovered.

malfist

Okay? Aren't the semiconductors we use today room temperature? I certainly don't use helium to cool my phone. I don't see any claims that this is better than the current silicon and gallium arsenide semiconductors that we use. And the use of "room temperature" seems a deliberate attempt to misconstrue this with superconductors

monocasa

Sounds like a good reason to hire a lab to make some, and then make a big deal about it if the results pan out. I can think of worse uses of VC AI funding.

poulpy123

Lmao, anything goes