027 | Beyond Rare Earths: AI and the Race for Better Materials

right?So let's zoom out a little bit and, you know, talk about impact also.

You mentioned that Alkeme AI is offering, let's say, a platform technology which can serve multiple industries at the same time.

You me- mentioned aerospace, robotics, car industry, automotive industry, et cetera.

So I understand that there is multiple industries that all need your products or your, you know, materials.

So what is the product impact behind it? You know, why, why does humankind or why does the world need material science in general and today more than ever? So why are we at this point of, you know, material science and with new materials becoming such a discussed and, you know, demanded topic?

Yeah.

It's interesting.

I would say in some ways it's probably the other way, right? I mean, human, we always discover new things.

You see drug discovery and, uh, in life science, you know, this, uh, active discovery happening all the time and also in chemicals is also for something very interesting.

I mean, this is the industry where I come from and, um, you know, in pharma people spend about 20% of their revenue on R&D.

Uh, but then in, um, the chemicals and materials about 2%, right? And most of that is actually being spent on process engineering to make it more efficient and stuff like that, yeah.

And then, you know, typically when you design stuff, you try to work around what exists, right? Instead of trying to say, "Okay, what can I do with, uh, something that is completely different?" I'm afraid I don't have a real answer as to why people have kind of stopped, uh, innovating, uh, in the material space the same way that pharma does, right? Probably, yeah, it's, um, some-- at some point you have the material that you have and it's good enough and, and that's, uh, you know, so be it, right? And not to say there's no innovation still happening.

There's still innovations, right, but just not at the same scale.

And I think, you know, we, we're kind of facing in, at this age, I think there's both the need and also the enabler, right? Uh, where we could actually tackle this space more efficiently.

Um, and ac- actually maybe one more thing before I go there, right? So I'm trained as a biochemist, um, so I'm more in the organic chemistry space, right? And, um, the-- a- actually it, it is actually quite interesting how when you're in organic chemistry and in pro- like doing protein or doing other organic chemistry stuff, right? When you synthesize stuff, typically you have a compositions that was given to you and you go to the lab and synthesize it and if you manage to get that composition, it give you basically that compositions, right? Um, it, it's not more complicated than that and then you try to remove, let's say, all the impurity that come with the processing step.

That, that's typically the challenge.

But in organic synthesis, which we're, what we're talking about, next to the composition you also have the structure, right? It's not only that you get, you know, let's say iron three oxygen, uh, five, right? Uh, you also need to be able to get that, uh, the, the atoms, uh, arranged in the right structure, right? And this is something that is much, uh, harder to, to get to in my, you know, humble opinion as, um, coming from a, a different field.

You, you have a lot more, let's say, thermodynamic stability that impact, uh, so temperature and pressure and time become your friends in this case, right? Like how you could, like I say, man- manipulate this metallurgy world.

So I think that, that's also another reason why maybe that, you know, things have not been so active, right? So now I say about, you know, the demand and also the enabler.

So the demand is that in this kind of rapidly changing, uh, world, right, you're coming up to the limit of the technology that you have so you're not having, let's say, the speed of development in semiconductor, for example, the same way that we did in the past, right? Uh, and then also we have new challenges around climate change with different technologies that you have to bring online and then also geopolitical, the topic becomes something, um, the, the, uh, more prominent, uh, these days, right? Uh, so I think this kind of confluence of things that make people realize, okay, the arsenal of materials that we have access to today might not serve my need, right? And then on the enabler side, I think, I mean, AI just enable us to look into the space a lot more efficiently, both to find that needle in the haystack but also to find a way to make them.