When Google's Crystal Count Collapsed Under Scrutiny

Google DeepMind's GNoME announcement landed with the kind of numerical clarity that science journalism rewards: 2.2 million new crystal structures, a prediction hit rate transformed from near-zero to industry-leading, a Nature paper behind it. Those properties — large, specific, credentialed — made it easy to distribute and hard to walk back. The researchers who published their rebuttal were not disputing that the model had done something computationally interesting. They were disputing whether 'discovered' meant what the headline implied. Stability prediction and synthesis are different claims, and the gap between…