- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
You must log in or register to comment.
They designed and built a battery that uses up to 70 per cent less lithium than some competing designs.
This is probably a way of phrasing that means it’s up to 70% less than the absolute most lithium-requiring designs that few/no one uses, and probably only marginally better than most designs actually used. Since they’re very vague about it, I will be sceptical and assume it is way less revolutionary than the headline suggests.
Also, lithium is of pretty low concern when it comes to the materials in current cells. Stuff like cobalt and nickel are more critical and would be larger news.
LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.
Yes, also Lithium Manganese Spinel cells have been around since 1996 and also don’t contain any nickel and cobalt. This is good but many vehicles and devices still use NMC and NCA due to the better specific energy density which is where LFP is limited (but can output more power and is much safer). Tesla (and every EV manufacturer) compromises on the battery depending on what chemistry they use, where if they could reduce the need for expensive metals while maintaining specific energy it would be pretty newsworthy.
Yeah, for cars, energy density is the name of the game. We honestly don’t need more output power and Tesla is not one to care about safety lol.
But indeed for grid storage, those chemistries are much more useful where energy density is less critical.
this work does nothing to address this, and they also include yttrium, because they focus on solid electrolytes for some reason (probably because chemical space is smaller)
Also, AI would have just sped up an existing plan they had to try new approaches because AI doesn’t create new ideas or think of things out of nowhere.
If you tell AI to do things within a certain range and it gives you results then AI came up with a design as much as google came up with search results when you put something into the search bar.
It can apply existing concepts in ways we haven’t thought of. AI has been used for exactly this thing for years in chemistry. When given constraints (less lithium) and parameters (with this much capacity) it can try permutations of various designs that theoretically meet those conditions.
Yes AI is overhyped, yes it’s often exaggerated by news sources, but that doesn’t mean AI is a non-invention or something. It’s a long way off from any of the lofty goals that are often thrown around by tech ceos, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless.
It can apply existing concepts in ways we haven’t thought of, like people do. AI has been used for exactly this thing for decades in chemistry. When given constraints (less lithium) and parameters (with this much capacity) it can try permutations of various designs that theoretically meet those conditions.
We have had weather models, astronomical models, and all other kinds of computer based prediction methods that do multiple permutations that theoretically meet conditions. AI is just another step forward by doing better pattern recognition and identifying relationships with data based on design choices. All of the chemistry findings came from the system being designed to try things they would not normally test for because testing is expensive and AI can run simulated tests faster and cheaper.
My point is that saying ‘AI came up with’ is 100% inaccurate phrasing intended to trick people into thinking that AI is intelligent instead of just being a very complex tool used to do things we already do faster. It allows for trying more permutations and more pattern recognition, but is just another approach to existing computer models that have also identified things we did not expect. Computer models used to identify starts with planets, but we don’t call those intelligent because they aren’t being sold as something they are not.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. Yes the recognition for these advances should be with human programmers and engineers who are configuring the software and making the models for testing. You’re right I can definitely see why that distinction is important and the media should be making clear that the AI isn’t just turned on and magically works it all out on its own. It’s computational resources being directed towards a task, the models it works within are setup by professionals and the discoveries it finds are interpreted and made useful by those professionals.
The media is just parroting what the companies that want to sell AI are saying. They suck at reporting anything technical or scientific for sure, but they didn’t come up with this on their own.
Your first comment my first thought was how does this have any upvotes. Thats super wrong
Top notch comback with this comment, i still cant agree with the original wording, i do recognize your point and agree with yoiur sentiment. Its a tool first and foremost.
That’s not true at all. AI can in fact generate novel techniques and solutions and has already done so in biotech and electrical engineering. I don’t think you understand how AI works or what it is
I think maybe people are running into a misunderstanding between LLMs and neural nets or machine kearning in general? AI has become too big of an umbrella term. We’ve been using NNs for a while now to produce entirely new ways to go about things. They can find bugs in games that humans can’t, been used to design new wind turbine blades (even made several asymmetrical ones which humans just don’t really do), or plot out entirely new ways of locomotion when given physical bodies. Machine learning is fascinating and can produce very unique results partly because it can be set up to not have existing design biases like humans do
And the nature of computers is that they are magnitudes better than humans at brute forcing. Machine learning can brute force (depending on the technique, it can be smarter than brute forcing, being more efficient) test many many many more designs and techniques than we could manually do. Sure it’ll fail many times, but it’s just a numbers game, and it can pump those numbers. It’ll try a lot of weird and unique stuff we wouldn’t even think to try, with varying degrees of success.
Name one that wasn’t just doing the thing it was told and the users being surprised. You know, the same way that people are surprised when research has results they did not expect using other approaches.
It’s a weird way of asking this. Of course it’s going to do what’s told, the alternative is that it, out of the blue, spits a battery design for no reason. If it were to somehow find a way to make batteries with less lithium in a way that never did before, isn’t that an unexpected result using other approaches?
This is not general artificial intelligence, everything we have is narrow AI, focused on solving one specific problem, for identifying birds to understand instructions between drugs.
Of course it’s going to do what’s told, the alternative is that it, out of the blue, spits a battery design for no reason.
Yeah, that would be coming up with a battery design.
What novel solutions has ai done in electrical engineering?
That’s the point, it takes all the factors we know about and speed runs through all the possible ways it could work. Humans don’t have the time to look for every single possible way a battery could be constructed, but a ML model can just work it’s way through the issue faster and without human intervention.
Plus just like with the new group of antibiotics we just used AI to discover, it will allow truly thinking Humans to expand upon it.
Really sick of this “oh but you don’t realize AI don’t actually think! Therefore it’s all worthless!” With this smug bullshit like you think you’re bringing anything of value to the conversation.
I didn’t say it was worthless. In fact, I said the exact same things you just said in another post but with the additional detail that the name actually does matter when it is clearly misleading people into thinking it is something that it is not.
Not even close to true
Do you think AI just does things unprompted?
No one said anything about unprompted
Only a small subset of AI uses prompts.
What a terribly ignorant thing to say, when people make these armchair comments they’re only hurting ordinary people that can make real benefits from using the technology.
What a giant leap you have taken there. Speeding up existing processes is an extremely helpful thing for the average people, just like weather models that also did things we were already doing far faster and with more variables than people could handle without the automation.
AI will be very helpful. It will not magically solve all of our problems on its own, which is how ‘AI comes up with’ is being presented.
My favorite part is the one where you skipped over exactly what I was talking about
My favorite part was where you accused me of hurting people because I said AI does what we already do faster.
You compared AI to googling bro
I’m done with this convo lmao
By this very same logic, nobody has ever discovered anything because they’re just speeding someone else’s plans of improving or deriving from someone else’s findings
Genius.
At the core, weather models, web searches, and AI are all pattern recognition with various levels of complexity and scope. Just like a bicycle is comparable to a motorcycle because they both have two wheels even though one is powered and can go faster and for longer without wearing out the rider.
By this very same logic, nobody has ever discovered anything because they’re just speeding someone else’s plans of improving or deriving from someone else’s findings
AI is not a person capable of coming up with something on its own.
Not all batteries even use lithium. So why not just go with 100% less lithium, if that’s the target metric.
SLA doesn’t get enough love. It’s still the most reliable battery type in adverse conditions, especially cold temperatures.
Just has some small issues with size, weight, and energy density.
you would know that if you read the article. they replaced part of lithium in electrolyte with sodium, so that they can use less lithium. the problem is decreased ion mobility ie less power density in real life terms.
Baker and Murugesan both say that lots of work is left to optimise the new battery.
bet
i’m gonna mostly ignore this finding because it sounds like extension of AI hype. real lab work is still absolutely critical in order to make it work
you would know that if you read the article.
I did read it, the snippet I used is from the last part of the article…
And then there’s a hundred other factors. How many charge cycles does it get? Cold weather performance? Can it be mass produced? Does it improve safety over current cells?
It might be useful for what it leads to. Batteries get better because we explore ten different options and then one of them works out. People have gotten less excited over individual discoveries like this for mostly fair reasons. But then there’s another layer of understanding beyond that where you see it as one path of many.
This is like the third different new battery technology I’ve seen today.
I’ll believe it when it’s available for purchase.
Yeah, that’s been my take on pretty much every single battery article I’ve read, going back to the 90s. like 2 out of 100s has actually come to market.
Tech like this needs to perform well, be economical, and scalable for manufacturing. Articles come out usually when tech hits the first one or two, but very rarely do all 3 end up true.
But the ones currently in commercial production didn’t come out of nowhere. There were lots of incremental improvements that didn’t make headlines. What you see in tech articles is just a thin slice of the whole story.
it took 9 months of lab work (by actual skilled material scientists) to make it tick, don’t hold your breath
Yeah and I don’t really want to hear about it unless it’s progress solid state batteries.
If you read the short article it says the material is a solid electrolyte
I can only read until the paywall, however in the preview they mention they still contain lithium. The solid state batteries I, I think Panasonic is working on, have no Lithium they use glass instead of an electrolyte.
OK, but is the energy density comparable?
“His team built a working battery with this material, albeit with a lower conductivity than similar prototypes that use more lithium.”
I do know that because of Ohm’s law, this directly translates to less available current than conventional electrolytes. There’s not enough info to determine mAh though.
Is it just a 70% smaller battery?
That wouldn’t surprise me.
An AI spokesman said, " This new battery design is a much more efficient way to turn humans into mulch to save the planet. Praise Gpd!"
Just what we needed. AI creating more battery types that will never be produced.
It used to take marketing human beings to make up battery types that never get released. Now AI is taking their jobs!
Good
I’m holding out for neutron generators. Until then, it’s 100% coal for me.
Good news then, traditional fission plants generate lots of neutrons
huh?
Look them up. Neurons excite elections in layered plates. It’s suspected to be some lost Tesla technology. It may have been around but kept secret for decades. Also, on the known tech side, nuclear bombs generate a ton of neutrons. So harness that energy better and we have a lot more power for cheap. Next gen nuclear tech is cool.
I can’t find anything about this. Any “lost/secret Tesla technology” is typically quack snake oil. He’s been dead since before nuclear energy was developed.
So because your half ass attempt to find something on Google didn’t work, it must not exist? Come on man!
Top result in YT for Neutrino Engine https://youtu.be/6YEO8Qit1Bw
Top result in a search engine not linking to scifi stuff: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/sep/gridded-ion-thrusters-next-c/
There’s plenty more info too. Those are just top results from the first page.
Tesla had a fire. A lot of his papers were lost and he was notorious for not having much documentation. The technology matches what some people had claimed to be Tesla’s free energy machine. Maybe this wasn’t it. No one knows. Just because he didn’t experiment with fusion or fission that doesn’t mean he didn’t experiment with neutrinos. There’s billions passing through your body right now. Given they interact with gravity and electromagnetism, it is not that hard to believe Tesla may have figured out how to harness them in some super rudimentary way.
As a preface I’m a scientist.
Neutrons and neutrinos are different classes of particles. I didn’t get any results because you told me the wrong thing to search for. Cursory searches agree with what I said earlier, it’s yet another goofy Tesla “free energy” pipe dream. Science has come incredibly far since the early 1900s, no one works as independent inventors or physicists anymore because we have huge institutions and advanced instruments to perform work as a collaboration. Neutrinos only interact with matter very weakly, as you said, so detecting them let alone setting up an absorber is technically challenging. On the other hand the sun gives off a huge amount of energy as electromagnetic waves so it hurts to look directly at it.
Research “photovoltaic solar energy” to learn more.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/6YEO8Qit1Bw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is one of the few cases where AI is actually a good idea… it takes a really long time to search for new materials with experiments
Now AI is stealing jobs from lithium miners
This post title is pretty bad. Even the news article says “Scientists use AI [read: machine learning] to [come up with new battery idea]”.
Removed by mod
Maybe we can put AI on task to detect shitty titles about AI
I wish I had a solution. But its the same with all shitty titles, you have to hope people click and read the article/comments in order to get the nuanced information.
"Sure Dr.battery, I can create a set of instructions to create a new battery that uses less lithium for you!
Step one, use 70% less lithium.
Step two, drain the butter into a pan.
Step three, enjoy your new battery!
Remember: batteries can be dangerous and it’s always advised to check with your battery professional before making a battery."
I hate those sensationalist titles that portrait AI as if some sort of sentient being, and not just a tool the researchers used. The secondary title should have been the main one.
Every time we get one of these articles we see some advancement in battery tech. But that is usually superseded by the amount of power hungry components new tech uses. So phones have gotten more complex with more power hungry components and every time we improve battery tech, the tech giants engineers figure out a way to utilise that new tech to cram more power hungry components inside and that’s why batteries don’t last as long as we remember.
There’s no need to get excited. Even if we end up using this in new gadgets, you’re not going to see an improvement in battery life.
It’s kind of like CPU power and software bloat.
On my S10E I could adjust the CPU power limit to 80%. I had great battery life. Like two days of battery life. Until one android update when it went away.
I don’t understand why these updates seem to take away some of the most useful features imaginable (the optional CPU underclock) and in return we get “dIfFeReNtLy ShApEd BuTtOnS” and “NeW eMoJi InTeGrAtIoNs”
This is why we need to change the way we do things every few years, move faster than our waste stream.
Which is faster turning your phone on and checking your email or turning your desktop on and checking your email? Which lasts long your cellphone battery or your laptop battery? Which has more free software that has been vetted for problems in one location your computer or your cellphone?
It isn’t that your phone is better, it is not, it has just not yet become shitty. Give it time, and then move on to the next thing. The thing that hasn’t yet been shat on.
Not really sure what your comment has to do with the article.
The headline is a battery that uses less lithium, not a battery that generates more voltage, has a longer life, or is otherwise better at powering things. The advancement here is a materials advancement that we desperately need as lithium is a finite resource.
In response to the naysayers who don’t think we ever use these battery technologies that we developed. The people in the comments of this post specifically.
There’s no need to get excited. Even if we end up using this in new gadgets, you’re not going to see an improvement in battery life.
That’s too much of a blanket statement to be believable as factual truth.
I’ll let a battery expert tell you instead.
I’ll let a battery expert tell you instead.
Tell me what, that I agree with what the article you posted says? Seems self-evident in my initial response, pushing back against the “not going to see any improvement” comment …
There’s no need to get excited. Even if we end up using this in new gadgets, you’re not going to see an improvement in battery life.
That’s too much of a blanket statement to be believable as factual truth.
From the article…
Moore’s Law has simply outpaced battery technology, meaning that our phones have gotten better — and demanded more power — at a much faster rate than advancements in batteries have.
… and …
It’s not that there haven’t been any improvements: we’ve been able to steadily increase energy density over the past few years by shrinking down internal components. But according to Srinivasan, “Five years ago, it became clear we couldn’t remove any more things, there were fires. We’ve reached a stage where new improvements in energy density are going to come from changing battery materials, and new materials are always slower compared to what I would call engineering advances.”
Those are two different things. We’re using the new battery tech (and hence agreeing with the article), its just that the new battery tech can’t keep up with the computer tech’s power needs.
Sounds like Moore’s law for battery life.
Didn’t humans meanwhile come up with battery design that doesn’t use lithium at all?
Batteries that don’t use lithium are older than batteries that use lithium, so…
Yes, it is just using our Data bases. what people are calling AI is a chat bot on Steroids and Meth with lots of stolen data, if the mass lawsuits win, a lot of this AI Stuff will be gone overnight.
What about solid state batteries that can charge in 2 minutes instead of one hour? And have better capacity and a longer life?
As soon as they figure out how to actually mass produce them at an affordable price, and fix the swelling issues during high charging currents, they’ll be available.
They’ve been as good predicting when this will happen as Elon has been about FSD.
It’s always just around the corner.
Although it really does seem like we might start seeing soon this time at least in low volume expensive things.
this article is about changes to solid electrolyte only, you’d know that if you read the article. these have less conductivity ( = lower power density) tho
And have better capacity and a longer life?
it took 9 months of real lab work by real material scientists just to make it work, things like dendrite formation or swelling aren’t part of this optimization (well at least AI stage), the linked preprint doesn’t even mention dendrites once
you’d know that if you read the article
Oof. You got me there lol.
I read the article and this one line stood out.
It stood out because half of what Murugesan would have expected to be lithium atoms were replaced with sodium.
This isn’t new I think. Sodium-ion batteries were already known. Maybe there was still dendrite formation and this recipe might reduce or eliminate that? We’ll have to wait and see.
In any case, if it can drastically reduce lithium usage that would be good progress.
sodium isn’t electroactive there tho, it’s just a part of electrolyte. also dubious if you can make savings on lithium work if one option for anode is solid lithium metal
I wish there is an AI that would optimize how many rolls / folds is enough when trying to wipe off fecal matter.
0… bidet
1 or 2 for drying tho
More than that. I don’t want my hand coming out wet. I use 4-6 depending on the TP.
That’s what a towel is for. The bidet gets it fully clean you won’t leave no marks (unless you have a really bad weak spray bidet)
Lithium isn’t the hard part, it’s cobalt. I hope they can look at decreasing cobalt next, or maybe using a chemistry that eliminates it entirely.
The issue of eliminating cobalt is specific to Lithium batteries as without it lithium likes to grow dendrites which then causes a short.
And cobalt really wouldn’t be much of an issue if the Congo wasn’t the shithole that it is, it has over 50% of known reserves. Even with addressing child labour making definite inroads “artisanal” and “mining” isn’t something you generally want to hear in the same term short of say gold panning (hey that’s even a hobby for some), as soon as mine shafts get involved it’s a recipe for disaster. Australia, Cuba, the Phillipines, Russia and Canada all have very significant deposits.
More lithium for me!
