Damo Academy unveils an AI agent able to discover superconductors

Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy has unveiled what it calls the industry’s first artificial intelligence agent for discovering superconducting materials, saying that the tool has already found four previously unknown compounds that were later verified in laboratory experiments. Superconducting materials are substances able to conduct electricity without resistance and expel magnetic fields when cooled to low temperatures – a capability breakthrough that could revolutionise power grids, quantum computing and high-speed maglev trains. Discovering new superconductors has long relied on laborious, trial-and-error experiments because scientists still lack a complete theoretical framework to predict superconductivity. Over the decades, researchers have only accumulated about 2,000 known superconducting materials in the widely used SuperCon database. The AI agent, dubbed Elements Claw, was designed to accelerate the timeline by scanning scientific literature and screening millions of crystal structures to propose candidate materials for laboratory validation, according to Damo. The system was developed in collaboration with Renmin University of China and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Powered by a specialised, one-billion-parameter foundation model trained on 125 million molecular and crystal structures, Elements Claw screened 2.4 million stable crystal structures in 28 hours of graphics processor computing time. It identified about 68,000 candidates with superconducting potential, which it then narrowed down to the most promising options for physical testing. Rong Yu, head of scientific intelligence at Damo Academy, described them as the first superconducting materials discovered by an AI agent and subsequently confirmed in laboratory experiments, according to a post on the academy’s official WeChat account, although thousands of other candidates were yet to be explored. Alibaba’s announcement comes as technology companies increasingly look beyond chatbots and coding assistants to apply AI to scientific research. Instead of generating text or software code, these systems are designed to search scientific literature, analyse vast data sets and propose hypotheses that researchers can test in the laboratory. Alibaba joins the growing list of technology companies applying AI to scientific research. In the US, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has transformed protein research, while Microsoft has developed AI tools to speed up the discovery of new materials. Materials discovery is widely seen as one of AI’s most promising scientific applications because researchers must evaluate vast numbers of possible compounds before identifying a handful worth testing in the laboratory. AI could significantly shorten that process. Huang Wenbing, an associate professor at Renmin University’s Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, said the framework for the Elements Claw could also be extended beyond superconductors to support the discovery of materials for solid-state batteries, catalysts and thermoelectric technologies. Like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold database, Alibaba is betting that opening its predictions to researchers could accelerate discoveries beyond what a single laboratory can achieve. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.