Periodic Labs got here out of stealth on Tuesday with a battle chest of $300 million as a seed spherical, backed by a tech business’s who’s who: Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos.
Interval Labs was based by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the supplies and chemistry crew at Google Mind and DeepMind, the place certainly one of his initiatives was, for example, an AI software known as GNoME. That software found over 2 million new crystals in 2023, supplies that might in the future be used to energy new generations of know-how, researchers say.
Fedus is a former VP of Analysis at OpenAI, and one of many researchers who helped create ChatGPT. He additionally led the crew that created the primary trillion-parameter neural community.
Its small crew is likewise full of researchers who’ve labored on different main AI and supplies science initiatives, from constructing OpenAI’s agent Operator to engaged on Microsoft’s MatterGen, an LLM supplies science discovery AI.
The aim of Periodic Labs is nothing lower than to automate scientific discovery, creating AI scientists, the corporate says. This implies constructing labs the place robots conduct bodily experiments, acquire knowledge, iterate, and take a look at once more, studying and bettering as they go.
The lab’s first aim is to invent new superconductors that it hopes carry out higher and presumably require much less power than current superconducting supplies. However the well-funded startup additionally hopes to seek out different new supplies.
One other aim is to gather all of the bodily world knowledge that its AI scientists produce as they combine and warmth and in any other case manipulate varied powers and uncooked supplies of their seek for one thing new.
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“Till now, scientific AI advances have come from fashions skilled on the web” and LLMs have “exhausted” the web as a supply that may be consumed, the corporate says in an introductory weblog submit. “At Periodic, we’re constructing AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to function.”
The hope is that, not solely will the labs invent next-generation supplies, however they are going to produce invaluable contemporary knowledge that AI fashions can devour to proceed their evolution.
Whereas this may be probably the most spectacular teams of researchers to assemble a startup for this objective, it’s not the one one engaged on AI scientists. AI as a software to automate chemistry discoveries has been a subject of educational analysis since a minimum of 2023. It’s the pursuit of tiny startups like Tetsuwan Scientific, in addition to non income like Future Home and the College of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium.
