this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 147 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (29 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.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago (22 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 months ago

What novel solutions has ai done in electrical engineering?

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