Orbital Materials, an industrial technology developer leveraging AI to design and deploy new climate technologies, is open-sourcing an AI model called “Orb” for advanced materials design. Orb is more accurate than leading models from Google and Microsoft and 5x faster for large-scale simulations. This marks Orbital’s first open-source contribution to accelerating the development of new advanced materials.
“Advanced materials – things like semiconductors, batteries and catalysts – are the fundamental building blocks of the next generation of technologies. We’re open-sourcing Orb, the most powerful AI model for materials simulation, to accelerate the development efforts of teams around the globe”, said Jonathan Godwin, CEO and co-founder of Orbital Materials.
Advanced materials will power many technology breakthroughs required for the energy transition, including carbon removal, sustainable fuels, better energy storage and even better solar cells. However, developing advanced materials is a slow trial-and-error process that can take years of failure before achieving success. The holy grail of materials science and chemistry is “rational design” — designing new materials on a computer as you would a piece of furniture or a car engine.
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Rational design has historically been hampered by the failure of traditional computer simulations to predict real-life properties of new materials. AI offers a new computing paradigm that brings rational design one step closer to reality. With the release of Orb, research organizations around the world get access to the world’s leading AI under a permissive open-source license, drastically increasing the speed and accuracy of their simulations.
Orb is built upon Orbital’s foundation model called LINUS and is used by researchers at the company’s R&D facility in Princeton, NJ, to design, synthesize and test new advanced materials that power the company’s industrial technologies. The first product developed using the company’s AI, a carbon removal technology, is in the early stages of commercialization.
Source: GlobeNewsWire