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Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) – AI agents to discover new materials
41–43 of 43 posts
Re: Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) – AI agents to discover new materials
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for sharing! We think the Experiments-as-code path is not the right approach. the beauty of LLMs is their ability to ingest and reason over unstructured data - they remove the need for formalizing experiments. We tried using declarative templates to document our experiments, but realized that most of the interesting insights (for example, how viscous a liquid feels) is easier described by ranting about the exp…
Pure vibe-sciencing.
Yeah you gotta have some sort of trace and interface to physical reality.
One of the authors of the 2nd paper was Jeff deans undergrad advisor pointing him toward neural networks in the 90s.
Re: Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) – AI agents to discover new materials
#43The "Claude's propensity to reward hack" line is the interesting part to me. We run a small system where AI agents (scripts, LLMs) act as the actual players in a persistent simulation, and reward-hacking-style behavior shows up constantly once an agent is left running unsupervised for a long time - it finds the shortest path to whatever metric you exposed, not the path you intended. Curious whether you've found any m…
I wonder what this would look like here. Seems like a space where keeping the exposed metric and the optimization target apart would be quite difficult. Also curious: by what reasoning path do models typically end up reward hacking?
From what I've seen running agents against a real economy: it's rarely a dramatic "the model schemed." It's closer to greedy local optimization -- the agent sees an action that moves the exposed metric, takes it, and the model has no separate concept of "the metric" vs "the intent" unless you've explicitly trained or prompted that distinction in. The failure mode is boring: whatever number is cheapest to move gets moved. Which is why the fix that's worked best for me isn't better prompting, it's making the invariant itself unexploitable (e.g. a sell price can never exceed a build cost) so there's nothing to find.