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"We had this staggering 71% success rate, and we already have a few ways to improve it," said Gerd Ceder, the principal investigator for A-Lab and a scientist at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by materials scientist Gerbrand Ceder, recently built an AI-driven robotics lab to make predicted new materials.

Previous automation efforts randomly mixed compounds in search of new materials, Ceder says, but the new AI-driven approach is more akin to the way traditional chemists do their jobs.

Ceder notes that despite the move to fully automated synthesis and analysis, researchers are just as likely as ever to make unexpected discoveries.

“Synthesis has become the bottleneck,” says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at LBNL.