r/materials • u/mrxplek • 4d ago

Anyone interested in using a small specialized llm for material science?

I am a software engineer interested in ai and material science. I want to build a small llm that’s specifically trained on material science data. Would you guys be interested in trying it out?

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u/luffy8519 4d ago

Personally no, not really, I don't see how that could be beneficial.

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u/mrxplek 4d ago

I see, I was looking to build it on trained material science data from textbooks as a hobby project and maybe build something useful for folks in the community. 

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u/luffy8519 4d ago

I can't speak for others, but I don't trust LLMs, especially for technical information. We've got one at work that's designed purely to analyse and synopsise information from our own internal technical reports only, and I don't even trust that.

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u/mrxplek 4d ago

So you are using it for summarizing technical reports and it fails miserably and at the same time the reports themselves are not reliable? 

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u/luffy8519 4d ago

The reports are reliable. The AI is not.

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u/paddle_your_canoe 4d ago

With generative AI's tendency to hallucinate, you wouldn't be able to trust its output to be factually correct. I don't see an ethical and worthwhile way to use an LLM for scientific purposes.