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>> UK deep-tech company Materials Nexus announced on Tuesday that it has designed a new rare-earth-free permanent magnet with the help of its AI platform. It says the AI-driven discovery and development process was 200 times faster than the resource-intensive manual route, bringing new hope to an electrifying world with a growing appetite for powerful magnets.

>> Source: Materials Nexus

I know that the status quo in science journalism is to desperately find ways to excite people about research but this headline boils down to “scientists use computer to help with research” and the actual story is “company discovers new magnet”.
Don’t forget the totally factual “200 times faster than man”!
There is no explanation about what exactly has been discovered by the AI.

The existence of the iron nitride magnets as a REE-free (rare-earth-element-free) alternative to the REE magnets has been perfectly known for many years, much more than a decade. So no new magnetic material has been discovered by the AI, unless it differs somehow in some small details from the known iron nitride magnets.

Such magnets have been patented many years ago and startups have been created with the purpose of making and selling such magnets.

Nevertheless, until now there have been no practical results, for reasons that are kept secret by those who attempt to develop such magnets, but it appears that the crystal structure with good magnetic properties is unstable, so either the yields for making such magnets are very poor or the magnets degrade in time very quickly.

As far as I can tell, this ai was given a list of existing formulations for rare-earth free magnets, along with some statistics about them, the ai picked the "best", by some conditions the researchers picked and then the researchers tested that formulation to make sure it worked
Does this title make sense to anyone? Or is it some jargon that I just don't know.
This would be great if there were details, but it's just a press release. https://www.materialsnexus.com/news/magnex-rare-earth-free-p...

Computer-enhanced chemical and biological compound theory space search has been an idea for a while, so is it "working" now? How?

Not a single mention of what the magnets are made of nor how they compare to current state of the art.

Looks a bit like "New battery will replace lithium" articles

My head is spinning trying to understand the units in that headline.
I've got one - iron.

At the speed of man.

What exactly is this "MagNex" product and why is it worth an (long and mostly irrelevant to the point) article?