Opinion
Welling: Billion-Dollar Funding Rounds Signal Exploding AI for Science Bubble
“It's not just emerging, it's exploding, I would say. That's the better term, because I know you go from investments into like in the hundreds of millions, now in the billions. So there's now actually a startup by Jeff Bezos that, you know, is that 6.2 billion …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Welling: The Bitter Lesson of AI Scaling Will Overtake Materials Science
“The same bitter lessons or lessons that you can draw in LLM space are eventually going to be true in this space as well, I think.”
Insight
Welling: Diffusion Models Share Exact Mathematics With Non-Equilibrium Stochastic Thermodynamics
“It turns out that the mathematics that we use for diffusion models, but even for reinforcement learning, for Schrodinger bridges, for MCMC sampling, has the same mathematics as this theory, this physical theory of non-equilibrium Systems.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Welling: Semiconductor Scaling Limits Require Materials Innovation for Hardware Advances
“More or less we've reached the limits of You know, scaling things down, and now we are trying to improve further by new materials, so that's the fundamental materials problem.”
Insight
Welling: AI Enables Searching the Space of All Possible Molecules
“Now we can treat this as a search engine. Like we search the internet, we now search the space of all possible molecules, not just the ones that people have made, or that they're in the universe, but all of them.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Welling: AI materials discovery breakthroughs will require humans in the loop first
“I think that the breakthrough will happen with a lot of human in the loop, because there is the chemists who have a whole lot more knowledge of their field, and it's us who will, you know, help them with AI, training AI and new methods, and in that kind of int…”
Disclosure
Max Welling: CuspAI was founded because politics is failing on climate change
“I got pretty worried about climate change. I think we, and I think we should, you know, and politics seems to have a hard time solving it, especially these days, and so I thought better work on it from the technology side, and that's why we started CASP AI.”
Assertion Contradicted
Welling: Keeping warming under 2°C requires century-long atmospheric carbon removal
“In order to get, you know, to stay within two degrees, let's say, we would not only have to reduce our emissions to zero by 2050, but then, you know, another half century or even a century, Of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not by reducing your e…”
Insight
Welling: Physical Lab Experiments Act as Nature-Powered 'Physics Processing Units'
“I want to think of it as what I would call a sort of a physics processing unit, like a PPU, right? Which is you have digital processing units, and then you have physics processing units. So it's basically nature doing computations for you. It's the fastest com…”
Insight
Welling: Materials Discovery Moat Lies in Data and Platform Engineering
“Where the moat is in the data that you can get your hands on, and the, and actually building the platform”
Disclosure
Welling: CuspAI Only Pursues Materials Discoveries with Industrial Partners
“So we always, we only start to invest in the direction if we find a good industrial partner to go on that journey with us.”
Insight
Welling: Lab Automation Fails to Generalize Across Material Science Problem Classes
“And also, it is very vertical specific. So it's like completely automating something for problem A, You know, you can probably achieve it, but then you'll sort of have to start over again for problem B because, you know, your experimental setup looks very diff…”
Insight
Welling: Simple Data Augmentation Can Outperform Hard-Coded Neural Network Equivariance
“Sometimes actually data augmentation works even better than hard coding the equivalence in, and this is something to do with the fact that if you constrain the optimization, the weights, before the optimization starts, the optimization surface or objective bec…”
Opinion
Max Welling: 2D quantum gravity research yields zero real-world impact
“Working in two-dimensional quantum gravity, you pretty much guarantee there's going to be no impact on what you do relative, you know, maybe a few papers, but not in this world, at this energy scale.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Welling: Protein Folding and ML Force Fields Drove AI for Science Boom
“I think there's two big examples, you know, protein folding is a big one, and the other one is machine learning force fields, or something called machine learning inter-atomic potentials. Both of them have been actually very successful.”
Assertion Supported
Welling: Perovskite-Silicon Solar Panels Can Theoretically Reach 50% Light Capture
“They can now make solar panels with new perovskite layers on top of the silicon layers that can capture, you know, Theoretically up to 50% of the light, where now we're at, I don't know, maybe 22 or something, right?”
Disclosure
Welling: CuspAI has raised $130 million and expanded to 40 people
“We've grown to about 40 people. We've kind of collected a hundred thirty million investment in the, into the company, which is for a European company is quite a lot.”
Disclosure
Welling: CuspAI is partnering with Kemira to remove PFAS from water
“We want to remove PFAS from water, right? So we do this with a company, Camira. So they are a deep partner for us, right?”
Insight
Welling: Equivariant neural networks need far less training data
“Where if you build equivariance in, basically, once you've trained it in one orientation, it will understand it in any other orientation. So that means you need a lot less data to train these models.”
