More than 20 top artificial intelligence researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Meta have left their companies to join Periodic Labs, a new startup founded by ChatGPT co-creator Liam Fedus to develop AI that accelerates scientific discovery.
Over 20 leading artificial intelligence researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta have quit to join a new Silicon Valley startup, Periodic Labs, founded by ChatGPT co-creator Liam Fedus and Google DeepMind scientist Ekin Dogus Cubuk. The company seeks to build AI capable of driving real-world scientific discoveries in fields such as physics and chemistry.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered Rishabh Agarwal millions in stock and salary to join his company’s “superintelligence” project, but Agarwal declined in favor of Periodic Labs. The researchers turned down potential earnings worth tens or even hundreds of millions to pursue the startup’s mission.
“The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Fedus. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”
Backed by over $300 million in seed funding from venture capital firm a16z and others, Periodic Labs plans to establish a Menlo Park facility where robots will conduct large-scale experiments. These machines will run and analyze thousands of trials, training AI models to identify patterns that lead to scientific breakthroughs.
Fedus and Cubuk argue that chatbots like ChatGPT, which learn from digital text, cannot truly discover new knowledge without physical experimentation. “A chatbot can’t just reason for days and come up with an incredible discovery,” said Cubuk. “It will iterate… After lots of iteration, we hope to get there faster.”
Experts call the initiative a visionary step toward merging AI and experimental science.