About

Hey, I’m Anmol!

I study Materials Science and CS at Rice University, where I’m a Trustee Distinguished Scholar and Bhatia Foundation Scholar.

I work on machine learning models for materials, especially models that can scale beyond ideal crystal structures and start representing the messy parts of real materials: defects, impurities, microstructure, process history, and uncertainty. I care about this both because these models can help us design better materials for specific applications, and because they might give us a deeper way to understand science itself.

I’m also interested in understanding how AI models think. More generally, I care about questions like thought, reasoning, consciousness, and how those concepts might show up in systems very different from us. I’m involved with the AI Alignment movement, trying to understand if these alien minds understand (or even can) and respect human moral values.

Right now, I’m working with a stealth organization on a $100k compute grant to study how state-of-the-art physics models encode scientific understanding. At Rice, I’m president of Rice AI Alignment and a researcher in Ajayan Lab, where I work on machine learning for battery electrolytes.

Outside of work, I like cars, computers, silicon, prediction markets, films, strange machines, physical builds, and the possibility that science is mostly just debugging the simulation.

This site is where I put my interests, writing, research notes, and whatever rabbit hole I’m currently taking too seriously.