Discovered Materials Offers $1 Million in Prizes for Five AI Materials Science Problems

What happened

Discovered Materials is offering a $1 million prize pool for solutions to five open problems in materials science, selected with help from academics at leading global universities. The problems include explaining cuprate superconductivity and improving Density Functional Theory. The startup says frontier AI models spent several days on each challenge without making much headway.

Read next

• More changes in today’s briefingOpenAI Releases Images 2.6 With SVG Export, GIFs, and Faster Generation

The story so far

Discovered Materials announced a $1 million prize pool for AI models that solve five open problems in materials science. The challenges include explaining cuprate superconductivity and improving Density Functional Theory; the company said frontier AI models spent several days on each without making much headway. Academics at leading global universities helped select the problems. Discovered Materials is a San Francisco startup that uses AI models to find substances for advanced chips.