Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates

> 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 a ton of 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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

The title has been editorialized.

Actual title:

Two Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductor Candidates

There's nothing unusual about finding room temperature semiconductors. I assume whoever posted it misread this as room temperature superconductors, but it has nothing to do with that.

What's interesting here is the antiferromagnetic part of the title, which was removed. I think this makes it relevant for e.g. RAM, but not superconducting. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

Finding some new combination or iteration in the literature and running DFT is the kind of thing a senior undergraduate or first year grad student typically does (and typically with Claude anyway these days). (And yes, they'd probably use Quantum Espresso to start, like this writeup and its agent does). They'd probably show it at a weekly lab meeting where it would get ripped apart. And they would not be blasting a preliminary calculation around the world as if they'd made a new discovery.. but hey, we're in a brave new world; maybe they should!

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.

I've got a friend who has been doing this research since the 90s. There is real money involved in this. This isn't like a math proof with a 1mm dollar payout. I seriously doubt this discovery. Until they show it working, I call bullshit. A room-temperature semiconductor is worth WAY more than an AI company.

Discovered in whose data?

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

Lmao, anything goes

I could have gotten this in one prompt lmao

This doesn't sound like something that needed an LLM? It just brute forced a lot of combinations of elements until finding one with the right material properties in a simulation, or what am I missing? And the one that actually worked wasn't even a new invention? I suppose it's quite likely that whoever discovered the second one in 1999 also discovered the first one and didn't publish it, since it didn't work.

fuck dang with a rusty cactus, in retaliation for giving me a rate limit

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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.