In this Manhattan lab, AI designs materials from scratch

Radical AI’s ‘self-driving’ lab designs and tests new alloys, speeding up a material R&D process that often takes human scientists 20 years or more.

Inside a lab in midtown Manhattan, a robotic arm lifts small glass bottles and carefully mixes and weighs pellets of iron and other elements. Nearby, another machine melts the material into an alloy; other machines analyze the composition and structure and test it for hardness and how well it resists oxygen and heat.

It’s the type of work that materials scientists would do, but the experiment was designed by AI, and the “self-driving” lab is running nearly autonomously. Near the ceiling, a track is designed to carry samples from station to........

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