Discovered Materials, a months-old, San Francisco startup using AI models to find new substances for building advanced chips, announced a million-dollar challenge for AI models to solve five critical problems in materials science. While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have yet to truly plumb the complex physics in advanced materials. How do we know AI is making progress?” Though materials science doesn’t have an equivalent of the Millennium Prize Problems, Discovered Materials recruited an advisory group of academics at leading global universities to spell out five open problems.
The company is offering a pool of prizes, worth $1 million in total, for solutions to the problems. The models spent several days on each problem without making much headway. Still, it’s easy to imagine OpenAI or Anthropic attempting to one-shot them with significantly more compute or a newer model.
If you go and solve these challenges, we are deepening our understanding of materials and how things around us behave.” Tracking efforts to solve the problems will show “whether the models are climbing in this domain,” he added. The challenge also reflects the changing nature of scientific inquiry as AI proves capable of uncovering insights and techniques human researchers didn’t anticipate. With solutions apparently easier to find than ever, the questions become more important.
When the company announced its seed round in August, Sridhar told TechCrunch that he hoped the company would generate a useful material within a year.
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