AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus
In a Nutshell
Liam Fedus, ChatGPT co-creator and OpenAI alum, co-founded Periodic Labs to apply AI foundation models to materials science, using language models as orchestration layers for analyzing literature, directing experiments, and leveraging specialized neural nets for quantum mechanics and atom interactions. The approach addresses data scarcity in physical sciences through interactive closed-loop experimentation, sample-efficient generalization from vast code corpora, and hybrid human-robot automation for high-throughput data generation. Vision: accelerate materials discovery by orders of magnitude for semiconductors, aerospace, and energy, enabling atomic-scale agency akin to digital revolutions, with robotics as a key accelerator toward domain-specific AI genius and self-improving systems.
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Liam Fedus is a co-creator of ChatGPT, VP of post-training at OpenAI, and previously at Google Brain working on early AI innovations. He discusses Periodic Labs, an AI foundation lab for atoms impacting materials sciences, chemistry, and the physical world.
Liam was a physics major in undergrad, did dark matter research with a directionally sensitive apparatus. Many AI leaders have physics backgrounds: Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Adam Brown (Google), Joshua (Anthropic manager). Physics provides principled, hard-nosed thinking with high leverage in AI. After Higgs discovery, high-energy physicists sought new frontiers as progress bottlenecked on apparatus. String theorists and black hole researchers moved into AI, recreating a Manhattan Project-like effort for intelligence.
In grad school, gravitated to machine learning for particle reconstruction. Switched to computer science, joined Google Brain first-year residency (2016-2017): era of distributed training, mixture of experts, transformer, small collaborations with few GPUs. Google Brain was small, later combined with DeepMind. Focused on architecture, sparsity for efficient model serving at scale, pushing scale toward late 2022.
Joined OpenAI excited about productizing compelling technology. Productionized GPT-4 post-training: ideas included writing bot, coding bot, meeting bot. John Schulman insisted on general chatbot, leading to ChatGPT effort. ChatGPT was the starting gun for AI revolution awareness.
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