MIT Associate Professor Heather Kulik discusses the structural and chemical challenges of building AI models for materials discovery compared to AlphaFold's protein modeling.
“The challenge is that you have a lot more than 20 building blocks when it comes to materials and so there's lots of different ways to think about chemical bonding, and right now no potentials are really robustly encoding all of that bonding, especially with respect to metal-organic bonding.”
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More from Heather Kulik
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Unnamed materials foundation model is only 5x faster than DFT and unreliable
“It's only in my hands the one I'm still not naming is only about five times faster than my fastest DFT calculation on a GPU, and it also doesn't work all the time.”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 20:32🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
Insight
Kulik: AI for materials is at 'ground zero' on manufacturing processing
“Most people who actually work on
Getting materials to the device scale, say something that would be in your television or something like that, is they will tell you that it's not just the material, it's the process.
And I think we're at ground zero.
We're nowh…”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 23:07🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
Opinion
Kulik: Materials AI Models Can Fail Far More Catastrophically Than AlphaFold
“So it's just hard to know from experiment or from other computations if these types of models are correct, and they're certainly not correct across all of chemical space and I'd say they could fail more catastrophically than AlphaFold obviously fails, though t…”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 26:23🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
Insight
Kulik: Literature breakdown temperatures from graphs frequently contradict authors' text descriptions
“One of the funniest things I think we noticed is that you can get the temperature at which a material will break down two ways. One, you can get it from the graph, and two, you can get it from what the authors say about how they interpret the graph. And those …”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 27:39🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Kulik: ML models deliver 100x to 1000x speedup per optimization dimension
“Usually, just even for a not so accurate machine learning model, you get, you know, at least a hundred to a thousand-fold speed up for every dimension you're optimizing over”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 8:14🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
Insight
Kulik: Machine Learning Can Select Optimal Quantum Mechanical Approximations
“Not all quantum mechanical approximations are equal, and you can actually use ML models to kind of predict what the best approximation to use is, depending on the material studied.”
Heather KulikMar 24, 2026▶ 12:35🔬There Is No AlphaFold for Materials — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
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