Hacker News Reader

Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

Replacing Lithium with Sodium, the only information this article suggests came from the AI, is about as trivial as you get in chemistry. That is a question that a high school teacher would ask their class after introducing the period table and expect everyone to know.

View on HN

> Vijay Murugesan at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state was one of the scientists who picked up the phone. He and his colleagues suggested additional screening criteria for the AI. After more elimination rounds, Murugesan’s team ultimately picked one of the AI’s suggestions to synthesise in the lab. It stood out because half of what Murugesan would have expected to be lithium atoms were replaced with sodium. He says that this is a very novel recipe for an electrolyte and that having the two elements together opens questions about the basic physics of how the material works inside a battery.

Seems it wasn't quite so obvious.

This article would be a lot better if there were anything material about what was novel. Mixing the two isn’t new. If the AI was anything more than a word-mashing stochastic parrot, it could have come with a representation that piked Pr. Murugesan’s interest or it could be that he had an idea while looking at gibberish ellucubrations, the way people find inspiration in their shower.

But unless the article explains what those representations are, we can’t tell.

> If the AI was anything more than a word-mashing stochastic parrot, it could have come with a representation that piked Pr. Murugesan’s interest or it could be that he had an idea while looking at gibberish ellucubrations

A lazy critique of llms but that is not what was used here. The paper is linked in the comments, if you're actually interested.

In all fairness to this article...

It does look like they are describing a sort of Lithium/Sodium mix rather than a 'pure' Sodium-ion battery, which is (at least to me) slightly novel.

It would then raise a bigger question: If the AI 'came up with it', does that mean that it can't be patented? Or does that depend on whether it came up with the manufacturing technique?

Sodium boosting Lithium battery isn’t novel at all. There’s a lot of SEO crum but here’s a two-year-old mention, for example: https://cnevpost.com/2022/11/29/sodium-ion-batteries-evs-ran...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com