this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 147 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.

This is probably a way of phrasing that means it's up to 70% less than the absolute most lithium-requiring designs that few/no one uses, and probably only marginally better than most designs actually used. Since they're very vague about it, I will be sceptical and assume it is way less revolutionary than the headline suggests.

[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Also, lithium is of pretty low concern when it comes to the materials in current cells. Stuff like cobalt and nickel are more critical and would be larger news.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.

[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yes, also Lithium Manganese Spinel cells have been around since 1996 and also don't contain any nickel and cobalt. This is good but many vehicles and devices still use NMC and NCA due to the better specific energy density which is where LFP is limited (but can output more power and is much safer). Tesla (and every EV manufacturer) compromises on the battery depending on what chemistry they use, where if they could reduce the need for expensive metals while maintaining specific energy it would be pretty newsworthy.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Also, AI would have just sped up an existing plan they had to try new approaches because AI doesn't create new ideas or think of things out of nowhere.

If you tell AI to do things within a certain range and it gives you results then AI came up with a design as much as google came up with search results when you put something into the search bar.

[–] Virulent@reddthat.com 16 points 8 months ago (3 children)

That's not true at all. AI can in fact generate novel techniques and solutions and has already done so in biotech and electrical engineering. I don't think you understand how AI works or what it is

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think maybe people are running into a misunderstanding between LLMs and neural nets or machine kearning in general? AI has become too big of an umbrella term. We've been using NNs for a while now to produce entirely new ways to go about things. They can find bugs in games that humans can't, been used to design new wind turbine blades (even made several asymmetrical ones which humans just don't really do), or plot out entirely new ways of locomotion when given physical bodies. Machine learning is fascinating and can produce very unique results partly because it can be set up to not have existing design biases like humans do

[–] rustyricotta@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 months ago

And the nature of computers is that they are magnitudes better than humans at brute forcing. Machine learning can brute force (depending on the technique, it can be smarter than brute forcing, being more efficient) test many many many more designs and techniques than we could manually do. Sure it'll fail many times, but it's just a numbers game, and it can pump those numbers. It'll try a lot of weird and unique stuff we wouldn't even think to try, with varying degrees of success.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Name one that wasn't just doing the thing it was told and the users being surprised. You know, the same way that people are surprised when research has results they did not expect using other approaches.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's a weird way of asking this. Of course it's going to do what's told, the alternative is that it, out of the blue, spits a battery design for no reason. If it were to somehow find a way to make batteries with less lithium in a way that never did before, isn't that an unexpected result using other approaches?

This is not general artificial intelligence, everything we have is narrow AI, focused on solving one specific problem, for identifying birds to understand instructions between drugs.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 0 points 8 months ago

Of course it’s going to do what’s told, the alternative is that it, out of the blue, spits a battery design for no reason.

Yeah, that would be coming up with a battery design.

[–] MrPoopbutt@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

What novel solutions has ai done in electrical engineering?

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's the point, it takes all the factors we know about and speed runs through all the possible ways it could work. Humans don't have the time to look for every single possible way a battery could be constructed, but a ML model can just work it's way through the issue faster and without human intervention.

Plus just like with the new group of antibiotics we just used AI to discover, it will allow truly thinking Humans to expand upon it.

Really sick of this "oh but you don't realize AI don't actually think! Therefore it's all worthless!" With this smug bullshit like you think you're bringing anything of value to the conversation.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

I didn't say it was worthless. In fact, I said the exact same things you just said in another post but with the additional detail that the name actually does matter when it is clearly misleading people into thinking it is something that it is not.

[–] Daxtron2@startrek.website 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] snooggums@kbin.social -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Do you think AI just does things unprompted?

[–] Daxtron2@startrek.website 2 points 8 months ago

No one said anything about unprompted

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Only a small subset of AI uses prompts.

[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What a terribly ignorant thing to say, when people make these armchair comments they’re only hurting ordinary people that can make real benefits from using the technology.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What a giant leap you have taken there. Speeding up existing processes is an extremely helpful thing for the average people, just like weather models that also did things we were already doing far faster and with more variables than people could handle without the automation.

AI will be very helpful. It will not magically solve all of our problems on its own, which is how 'AI comes up with' is being presented.

[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

My favorite part is the one where you skipped over exactly what I was talking about

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

My favorite part was where you accused me of hurting people because I said AI does what we already do faster.

[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You compared AI to googling bro

I’m done with this convo lmao

By this very same logic, nobody has ever discovered anything because they’re just speeding someone else’s plans of improving or deriving from someone else’s findings

Genius.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At the core, weather models, web searches, and AI are all pattern recognition with various levels of complexity and scope. Just like a bicycle is comparable to a motorcycle because they both have two wheels even though one is powered and can go faster and for longer without wearing out the rider.

By this very same logic, nobody has ever discovered anything because they’re just speeding someone else’s plans of improving or deriving from someone else’s findings

AI is not a person capable of coming up with something on its own.

[–] stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I never claimed that, humans discoveries are just new permutations of observed phenomena. Every single mechanism of the universe is a permutation of the baseline functionality: physics. Therefore, if we’re shitting on permutations, you’re shitting on all of science. AI can do what we do faster. It’s just applied “knowledge” - no different than humans. In fact, that’s the whole point of neural networks, to emulate what our brains literally do right now.

[–] LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It can apply existing concepts in ways we haven't thought of. AI has been used for exactly this thing for years in chemistry. When given constraints (less lithium) and parameters (with this much capacity) it can try permutations of various designs that theoretically meet those conditions.

Yes AI is overhyped, yes it's often exaggerated by news sources, but that doesn't mean AI is a non-invention or something. It's a long way off from any of the lofty goals that are often thrown around by tech ceos, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

It can apply existing concepts in ways we haven’t thought of, like people do. AI has been used for exactly this thing for decades in chemistry. When given constraints (less lithium) and parameters (with this much capacity) it can try permutations of various designs that theoretically meet those conditions.

We have had weather models, astronomical models, and all other kinds of computer based prediction methods that do multiple permutations that theoretically meet conditions. AI is just another step forward by doing better pattern recognition and identifying relationships with data based on design choices. All of the chemistry findings came from the system being designed to try things they would not normally test for because testing is expensive and AI can run simulated tests faster and cheaper.

My point is that saying 'AI came up with' is 100% inaccurate phrasing intended to trick people into thinking that AI is intelligent instead of just being a very complex tool used to do things we already do faster. It allows for trying more permutations and more pattern recognition, but is just another approach to existing computer models that have also identified things we did not expect. Computer models used to identify starts with planets, but we don't call those intelligent because they aren't being sold as something they are not.

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Not all batteries even use lithium. So why not just go with 100% less lithium, if that's the target metric.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

SLA doesn't get enough love. It's still the most reliable battery type in adverse conditions, especially cold temperatures.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Just has some small issues with size, weight, and energy density.