In Pursuit of Better Materials

Billions are poured into AI each year, over 400 billion in 2025 alone. Venture capital and consumer attention is constantly focused on solving the next software breakthrough, the next thing to give us more control over the digital world. Yet believe it or not, the reason your phone overheats, electric vehicles cost so much, and fusion is constantly “10 years away”, is not in fact a software problem.

And yet when MIT media lab posts on X a brand new discovery that could potentially enable one of these technologies, it gets under 20 likes. In comparison a chatgpt wrapper called Jasper AI that does copywriting for you raised 125 million at a 1.5 BILLION dollar valuation.

It’s clear that people will invest in the technologies that they can use today, rather than imagine themselves using 20+ years from now. A VC can write 100 checks to software startups and know within 18 months which will hit 30m ARR. With materials? That same clarity takes 18 years. Even if this material were to generate 100x the return, it doesn’t change the stark reality that the feedback loop in its current state is too long to be profitable.

So that leaves materials innovation to the bureaucratic hellscape that is academia and government institutions. Institutions that draw our brightest minds towards them, like the beauty of a black hole. But much like black holes, keep them trapped in orbit for decades before progress is seen.

Materials research is stuck on an endless road of bureaucracy, and the longer it is on this road, the larger the gap will grow between our technical capabilities, and the physical reality of us implementing them. We can invest in AI all we want but compute power will not build our fusion reactors, or quantum computers, or the suits that will allow us to live comfortably on Mars.

Breaking this cycle seemed impossible, and it has been. But the tools that can finally accelerate materials development are emerging. Computational simulations allow researchers to test thousands of variations before narrowing down to a select few to actually synthesize. Advanced manufacturing is shortening the gap between lab and production. The question is no longer whether materials innovation can move faster. It’s who will prove it first.

SpaceX revolutionized the space program. Anduril is bringing speed back to the defense industry, and Moderna proved that vaccines could be made in months. Each of these companies found ways to collapse timelines that everyone assumed were set in stone.

Materials innovation is long overdue for this same transformation. And unlike software, when this happens it won’t just change what’s on our screens. It will change what’s physically possible.