New lab lures AI talent

Founded by one of the inventors of ChatGPT, Periodic Labs aims to build artificial intelligence that can accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other fields, writes Cade Metz from San Francisco

- Cade Metz

Ekin Dogus Cubuk, left, and Liam Fedus are the co-founders of the start-up Periodic Labs in San Francisco.

(NYT)

This summer, the Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, invited Rishabh Agarwal to join the company’s new AI lab, offering him millions of dollars in stock and salary.

With the new lab, Mr Zuckerberg said, he wanted to build “superintelligence,” a technology that could eclipse the powers of the human brain. Though no one knew how to create superintelligence, he urged Mr Agarwal to make a leap of faith.

In a world that is changing fast, Mr Zuckerberg told him, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.

But although Mr Agarwal was already a Meta employee, he turned down the offer to join another company.

Mr Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big AI projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley startup, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.

As the AI labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building AI technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

“The main objective of AI is not to automate white-collar work,’ said Liam Fedus, one of the startup’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”

Mr Fedus was among the small team of OpenAI researchers who invented the online chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. He left OpenAI in March to found Periodic Labs with Ekin Dogus Cubuk, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, the tech giant's primary AI lab.