GNoME and the materials-discovery claim

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Google DeepMind's Graph Networks for Materials Exploration, announced in Nature in late 2023 with the claim that it had found 2.2 million new crystal structures, of which about 380,000 were predicted stable — described publicly as the equivalent of roughly 800 years of accumulated knowledge. It is included in this Journey because of what happened next. In April 2024, writing in Chemistry of Materials, Anthony Cheetham and Ram Seshadri of the University of California, Santa Barbara took a random sample of the proposed structures and reported that none of the sampled entries met a three-part test of being credible, useful and novel, that many were compositional substitutions on already known compounds, and that the outputs should be described as predicted crystalline inorganic compounds rather than as materials. The disagreement is not about whether the model produced predictions; it is about whether a computationally predicted stable structure constitutes a discovery. Neither position has been settled by synthesis at scale, and that is the honest state of the case.

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