A new startup, Periodic Labs, has emerged from stealth mode, making a grand entrance with a colossal $300 million seed round, an amount typically reserved for companies that have already made significant waves in the tech industry. The startup’s backers read like a who’s who of Silicon Valley, including heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and even Jeff Bezos himself.
So, what’s all the fuss about? Periodic Labs isn’t just another AI chatbot; it’s aiming to build AI scientists capable of running experiments, testing hypotheses, and iterating like human researchers. Imagine a robot chemist in a lab coat, but faster and less prone to accidental acid spills.
At the helm of this ambitious project are Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk, previously a materials and chemistry team lead at Google Brain and DeepMind, played a pivotal role in developing GNoME, an AI that discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials researchers believe could power futuristic technologies. Meanwhile, Fedus, a former OpenAI VP of Research, was instrumental in creating ChatGPT and led the team that trained the world’s first trillion-parameter neural network.
In essence, if you were to assemble an AI dream team to revolutionize science, these two would be your top picks.
Periodic Labs’ first target is superconductors, the holy grail of materials science. Today’s superconductors work, but they often require freezing temperatures or massive amounts of energy. Crack this nut, and you’ve got the building blocks for faster computers, more efficient power grids, and perhaps even levitating trains that truly feel like the future.
But Periodic isn’t stopping there. The startup plans to build autonomous labs where robots mix, heat, and tweak substances endlessly, generating not just new materials but a steady stream of fresh physical-world data. This is crucial because, as the company notes, today’s AI models have essentially “eaten the internet.” If AI needs new fuel to evolve, Periodic wants to be the one cooking it up.
The question remains: Can Periodic Labs’ AI scientists truly accelerate breakthrough discoveries in materials science, or is this $300 million bet on autonomous research labs overhyped given AI’s current limitations in physical experimentation? Will AI-driven materials discovery represent the future of scientific research, or will human intuition and creativity remain indispensable for making truly revolutionary scientific breakthroughs?
