Recently, Periodic Labs announced the successful completion of a $300 million seed financing round, attracting numerous prominent technology industry investors including Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos. The company was founded by researchers Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk previously led the materials and chemistry teams at Google Brain and DeepMind, developing an AI tool called GNoME, which discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials that could power next-generation technologies.
Liam Fedus was the former research vice president at OpenAI and participated in the development of ChatGPT, while also leading the team behind the first trillion-parameter neural network. The team at Periodic Labs consists of experienced researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and materials science, who have participated in major projects such as OpenAI's Agent Operator and Microsoft's MatterGen.
Periodic Labs aims to automate scientific discovery and create AI scientists. The company plans to establish laboratories where robots will conduct physical experiments, collect data, and repeatedly test, continuously learning and improving to find new discoveries. Their first goal is to develop new superconducting materials, hoping these materials will outperform existing superconductors and may require less energy. In addition, Periodic Labs also hopes to collect all data from the physical world, which will be generated by its AI scientists during experiments.
The company stated in its introduction that so far, the progress of scientific AI has mainly come from model training on internet data, and large language models (LLMs) have exhausted the available internet resources. Periodic Labs hopes to build AI scientists and their autonomous laboratories, not only creating next-generation materials but also generating valuable new data for AI models to further learn and evolve.
Although Periodic Labs has shown excellent performance in assembling such a strong research team, it is not the only company pushing forward the development of AI scientists. Research on AI as an automated tool for chemical discovery has become a focus for many small startups and non-profit organizations since 2023, such as Tetsuwan Scientific, Future House, and the Accelerate Alliance at the University of Toronto.
Key Points:
🔬 Periodic Labs secured $300 million in seed funding, aiming to achieve automated scientific discovery.
🤖 Founders Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus come from top AI institutions, with a strong team.
⚗️ The company plans to develop new superconducting materials and collect experimental data for AI to further learn and develop.
