About 25 years ago I wrote an article on 3D printing. At the time the possibilities seemed endless. Instead of taking material and shaping, cutting, and molding it, you would simply print it in your desired shape.
You could print classic car parts, space shuttle tiles, or even manufacturer homes on-site using CAD and the right concrete.
These things all happened of course but the promise of 3D didn’t quite live up to the hype. A living testament to this fact is sitting in my basement gathering dust, its spools of plastic wire unused and unloved.
That didn’t stop the share price of 3D Systems (DDD) from going up 2,000% in the early 2010s. It crashed and burned a second time in 2021, launching 1000% before settling down to $3.13 a share where it sits today.
The problem with 3D printing is that they never had the right core material to start with. Plastic spools can only get you so far.
New Material
The question is how does one discover new stuff. Think about Dupont creating all of those things out of petroleum. Nylon, for example. What you’d do is put a lot of smart chemists in a room and see what they came up with. 3M with the glue for Post It notes, or Dow Chemical’s discovery of Silly Puddy in an attempt to replace rubber.
Materials innovation drives major technological breakthroughs. The discovery of lithium cobalt oxide in the 1980s led to the invention of the lithium-ion battery technology. This now powers an endless assortment of devices from phones, to tools to electric cars.
However the old method of putting a bunch of smart people in a room, having them come up with a theory and then attempting to prove it through trial and error is a long, expensive and laborious process that leaves out an entire world of unknown.
More recently, big data and computational screening of large materials databases has allowed researchers to speed up this process.
That’s where AI comes in.
Microsoft (MSFT) has announced MatterGen which it calls:
“a generative AI tool that tackles materials discovery from a different angle. Instead of screening the candidates, it directly generates novel materials given prompts of the design requirements for an application. It can generate materials with desired chemistry, mechanical, electronic, or magnetic properties, as well as combinations of different constraints. MatterGen enables a new paradigm of generative AI-assisted materials design that allows for efficient exploration of materials, going beyond the limited set of known.”
You tell it what you want and it generates the materials that fit the design requirements.
“It can generate materials with desired chemistry, mechanical, electronic, or magnetic properties, as well as combinations of different constraints. MatterGen enables a new paradigm of generative AI-assisted materials design that allows for efficient exploration of materials, going beyond the limited set of known ones.”
You can find the whole paper here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/mattergen-a-new-paradigm-of-materials-design-with-generative-ai/
The point is that we don’t really understand the vast import of AI. It is much more than creating cool pictures or cheating on college essays. It is going to change every aspect of our lives from the molecule up.
There is no way this is priced into Microsoft’s valuation. Full disclosure, MSFT is my largest holding.
All the best,
Christian DeHaemer
Outsider Club
Elon Thinks What??? : His Dire AI Warning
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Eggactly: https://www.outsiderclub.com/forget-the-chickens-count-the-eggs/
Where Did It Go? https://www.outsiderclub.com/trump-bump-has-dumped/
