The recent publication of an unprecedented number of new crystal structures predicted by AI has attracted both praise and criticism. According to Bernd Ensing, this definitely means that AI has now reached the field of (in)organic chemistry.

‘I have yet to see the first successful prediction of a chemical product or a synthesis route by an AI algorithm that I would not have come up with myself’, a colleague recently told me, somewhat sceptical about the ongoing AI revolution. Indeed, in most (in)organic laboratories, AI does not seem to have made much headway—yet. But for how long?

Last November, Google Deepmind presented their GNoME project in Nature, in which the developers discovered the crystal structures of 2.2 million new inorganic materials. Less than a week later, Microsoft AI4Science followed on ArXiv with MatterGen, generating 1 million new materials. ‘A true breakthrough and a revolution for the development of new materials’, raved technical reviews in Wired, Science and Time, among others.