New Wave. AI for Materials: Breakthrough or Illusion?
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This week on New Wave Weekly:
👉 AI won’t magically invent new materials
AlphaFold worked because biology had great data. Inorganic materials don’t. Sparse datasets, missing thermodynamics, and poor characterization remain the biggest blockers.
👉 The real moat is synthesis, not models
From rare-earth-free magnets to catalysts, value is created in the lab: making, characterizing, and scaling materials that actually work in the real world.
👉 Vertical beats generalist (for now)
Foundational models are capital-intensive moonshots. Highly verticalized plays, magnets, catalysts, specific industrial use cases, have a much clearer path to market.
👉 Commercialization is brutally hard
Discovery is step one. Producing at scale, at cost, and getting industry adoption is where most materials stories break, graphene being the cautionary tale.
👉 Europe’s materials moment?
With critical minerals concentrated in China, supply-chain security is creating real pull from industrial players, not just curiosity, but urgency.
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Wave Makers:
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