Max Welling: AI Is Searching 10^60 Possible Materials and Accelerating Its Own Invention
charlieharris01 · x · 2026-09-29
Researcher Charlie Harris recalls reading Max Welling's papers on VAEs and GNNs in 2020/2021 while teaching himself AI during lockdown; since then they have co-authored a paper together and Welling has appeared on the etnshow podcast.
In the quoted clip, cusp.ai co-founder and CTO Max Welling discusses using AI to search for materials that don't yet exist:
- "AI is accelerating its own invention."
- "It's a bit dizzying... you constantly underestimate the speed at which things go."
- "It is disrupting the way we do science."
- "There's 10^60 possible materials you could potentially make that are stable in this universe, this universe has only created a tiny tiny fraction of that."
- "If you can find needles in this immense haystack, you can come up with totally crazy materials with totally crazy properties."
- "We are at the cusp of making that happen."
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