Is Google's AI Actually Discovering 'Millions of New Materials?'

During the month of November 2023, the artificial intelligence GNoME was the protagonist of a research within the world of Deep Learning - the result of this analysis led to the publication of a white paper concerning the millions of new materials that the AI claimed to have supposedly discovered - all managed by Google's Deepmind.

Months later, researchers have recently analysed a subset of what Deepmind claimed, obtaining different results from what was stated in the white paper. They claimed that they had 'not yet found any surprisingly new compounds'.

According to the original paper, GNoME had discovered 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials with the potential to power future technologies - these discoveries would equate to almost 800 years of knowledge, according to Google. The most recent analysis, however, pointed out that these crystals could be simple crystalline inorganic compounds and should be described as such, rather than using the more generic label of 'material'.