Generative artificial intelligence and its applications in materials science: Current situation and future perspectives

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is attracting the increasing attention of materials community for its excellent capability of generating required contents. With the introduction of Prompt paradigm and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), GAI shifts from the task-specific to general pattern gradually, enabling to tackle multiple complicated tasks involved in resolving the structure-activity relationships. Here, we review the development status of GAI comprehensively and analyze pros and cons of various generative models in the view of methodology. The applications of task-specific generative models involving materials inverse design and data augmentation are also dissected. Taking ChatGPT as an example, we explore the potential applications of general GAI in generating multiple materials content, solving differential equation as well as querying materials FAQs. Furthermore, we summarize six challenges encountered for the use of GAI in materials science and provide the corresponding solutions. This work paves the way for providing effective and explainable materials data generation and analysis approaches to accelerate the materials research and development.