AI Develops "Ground-Breaking" New Magnet Free of Rare Earth Metals

I'd say

> "Ground-Breaking" New Magnet Free of Rare Earth Metals Developed Using Machine Learning

Would've been a more accurate, but less click-baity title, that didn't imply the existence of an artificially intelligent entity developing something by itself. Human researchers used machine learning to comb through many possibilities and find one that fit the bill — which is still interesting and cool.

This is one of a slew of articles containing the following claims:

* magnet material was created used a new "AI platform"

* development process is 200x faster

* (raw ?) material costs are down to 50%

* carbon material emissions down to 70%

What is not said:

* Any kind of detail about the magnet material or material performance

Overall they seem much more intent on selling their "innovative, new AI material design process" than the material process

END_OF_RANT

> The AI system identifies and analyzes the composition of over 100 million potential alloys that would have the right properties to be a permanent magnet, be free of rare-earth elements, and meet the requirements of affordability and sustainability. The potential of this approach for the creation of new materials is enormous.

This is deeply annoying to me. AI didn't do anything - An engineer / scientist with a deep toolkit used a particular statistical algorithm (or just search + analysis?) to discover a useful thing. In the same way it might be newsworthy in some circles if a pure-theory mathematical result found surprising use in sports betting or medicine.

OTOH, I question whether I am moving the goalpost a little. Certainly it still requires a specialist with lots and lots of expertise to build a system that can algorithmically find solutions to a very hard problem. But those who look at an increasing amount of generality of a given algorithm and want to call it intelligence - who am I to say it's not?

So, I can see it both ways.

Since it tells us nothing about the magnet's characteristics wouldn't iron qualify?