on AI

 This will be an evolving blog post. I wanted to publish my first thoughts on this subject at this moment as a first benchmark since I've just graduated from high school.

6/10/2026

Every sector uses AI. There's no point in resisting it. If you're not using AI, you're behind; it is as prevalent as a calculator yet orders of magnitude more powerful. At this point, it is more important we embrace it than shy away from it.

I was surprised when I attended the MRS Spring 2026 conference that there seems to be more mixed opinions than I originally thought. The common complaints seem to be a lack of data and the lack of physics-embedded models. Yet agentic models can scrape the literature for more data than we can imagine, and RL closed loops such as those used at Periodic Labs and Radical AI embed real-time physics principles and experimental data with predictive models. We need researchers who believe in AI in every sector to bring these new ideas and understandings to shed light on crevices we once thought unreachable.

Only recently did I truly grasp the potential AI can have: AlphaFold has become one of the most successful AI tools in protein and drug discovery (we recently had a major breakthrough for pancreatic cancer, one of the most unforgiving types of cancer); we've used AI/ML to develop new nanoscale geometries for 3D printing; AI has been critical for ramjet engine design and even mars navigation.

The natural fear that arises from AI use is whether AI can overtake human control. As I see it, there are a few fundamental limitations between AI and human intellectual creativity and capacity:

  • Natural curiosity. Unprompted, without codified instructions, can AI ask a question because it simply wants to learn more? This is the root of human advancement and possibly also AI evolution in the future.
    • Caveat here: does it matter if the AI is engineered to have intellectual curiosity? Are humans "coded" to have intellectual curiosity?
  • Evolution. Can AI become self-sustaining? Can it locate and use its processing requirements on its own, train on its own, replicate its own source code, and bypass any "off" switches?

Since my knowledge in this field is limited, it is highly possible researchers already have answers to these questions. For now I will leave this post as is and update as my viewpoints evolve. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Entropy in Honolulu

This month has been a month of adventures. I just had the most phenomenal experience at the MRS 2026 Spring Meeting---in Honolulu, of all places!!---attending talks, connecting with researchers across disciplines, and finally presenting my own research during a poster session. This being my first conference, I was certainly very apprehensive at the start. How do you just walk up and talk to PhD students and professors who have an extensive career behind them? How do I introduce myself? What if I feel out of my depth? Fortunately, I very quickly learned that scientists are amazing: smart and thorough, yet humble, encouraging, curious, and extremely open-minded. The first two grad students I talked to during the Sunday Meet & Greet were from Florida State University, and they were so happy to answer all my questions! We talked about high-entropy materials, computational discovery, and general conference advice. Thanks to their initial support, I began to gain the confidence to appro...
Read more

TeChPW

 I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to be in the position where I was choosing between Caltech and MIT. Two phenomenal schools in their own ways: an impossible decision. In chronicling my jam-packed, transformational week at DiscoTech and Campus Preview Weekend I hope to highlight some of my insights for anyone in the same position in the future...or maybe you're just curious about the TeChPW week (pronounced Tech P W, or Tellurium, Carbon-Hydrogen, Phosphorus, Tungsten, if you're feeling fancy). Read on to find out which school I chose! Before I get into my day-by-day journal, here's just some background info on me (every experience is seen through a lens that's a product of a person's history, so hopefully you can see the rest of my stories from my perspective after understanding my history): I'm pretty ambitious. I want to solve challenging, meaningful problems. I have a vision of space exploration: it's always been my core belief that adv...
Read more