Periodic Labs is aimed at something different than the normal run of the mill AI company and the biggest sign of this by far has to be how researchers and scientists are leaving tens to HUNDREDS of MILLIONS on the table from OpenAI, Google, and Meta to go work for this start-up.
What makes Periodic Labs so much different that people would be willing to do so? Unlike most of the current offers in the AI space Periodic's goal is much more important.... they are aiming to accelerate discoveries in scientific areas like physics and chemistry.
Founded in March they have secured over $300 million in seed funding and have begun work at a research lab in San Francisco with plans to built their own lab in Menlo Park, California. At this future lab robots will run scientific experiments at a large scale instead of humans with the researchers guiding and organizing these experiments.
Much like how you train a LLM the hope is that using the same underlying tech of neural networks these systems can learn from images, sounds, and even movements and other kinds of data.
At Periodic Labs, A.I. systems will learn from scientific literature, physical experimentation and repeated efforts to modify and improve these experiments.
“It will not make the discovery on the first try, but it will iterate,” Dr. Cubuk said, meaning it will repeat the process over and over again. “After lots of iteration, we hope to get there faster.”
In todays day and age speed and timing is critical so the ability to speed up discoveries is something that runs in parallel to national security.