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

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

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.

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.

Discovered in whose data?

I could have gotten this in one prompt lmao

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Anyone remember LK99 lol

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."

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.