AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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Today, know Priors were talking with Liam Fetis. Liam is one of the co creators of ChatGPT, which I think almost everybody uses at this point. He was the VP of post training at OpenAI, and before that was at Google Brain, where he worked on a variety of really early AI innovations. Liam will be telling us a bit about Periodic Labs, his company, which is focused on building an AI foundation lab for atoms. In other words, how do we impact the physical world, material sciences, chemistry, etcetera, using AI? Very exciting topic and excited to be talking with him today. Leigh Ann, thank you so muc
us today on No Priors. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. Great to see you. Yeah. So maybe what we
can do I think you're doing incredibly interesting things in terms of alternative types of models, specifically for material sciences, for the physical world. Effectively, what you're building is an AI foundation lab for atoms, which I think is fascinating.
That's
right. But maybe we can start with this a little bit more of your background. You know, I think you were VP at OpenAI. You worked on one of the first trillion parameter models ever, etcetera. Could you tell us a little bit more about just what got you
here? So even further back, I was a physics major in undergrad, spent some time doing dark matter research. We had a apparatus that was directionally sensitive to dark matter's direction. Mhmm. So it was very interesting.
Are there Sorry to interrupt, I'd love to come back to this, but why are there so many physicists in AI right now? So you look at Dario Amadi who runs Anthropic. Of course. Yeah. You look at Adam Brown at Google, you look at a variety of people and they all kind of have these physics backgrounds.
Yeah. My old manager, Zhaasha, also in physics and non anthropic. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I think it's a great way to think about the world. It's like very principled, very hard nosed scientists, very careful. And I don't know. I think it's just it's such a incredible field. You have such high leverage in computer science and AI. Mhmm. And so I think a lot of physicists were seeing that. Mhmm. Particularly in like high energy physics. After the discovery of the Higgs, I think a lot of high energy physicists were sort of looking for what's next. Ultimately, it becomes bottlenecked on th
Mhmm. It's just been fascinating to see string theorists and people working on black holes and all sorts of effects moving into AI. Absolutely. Yeah. It almost feels like we're recreating a Manhattan Project or something, except now what we're seeking is different forms of intelligence. Yeah, that's right. Right. I'm just understand that perspective. Sorry to interrupt. So studied physics, you worked on dark matter.
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