More than 20 researchers have exited jobs at Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI enterprises in recent weeks to join a Silicon Valley startup called Periodic Labs whose main goal is “to accelerate science,” focusing on areas including physics and chemistry. The venture has secured more than $300 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and started work at a makeshift facility in San Francisco as it lays groundwork for a dedicated Menlo Park facility where “physical robots” will run scientific experiments on a very large scale.

Periodic Labs researchers “will organize and guide these experiments,” having AI systems analyzing “both the experimentation and the results” in the hope that the LLM collaborators “will learn to drive similar experiments on their own,” writes The New York Times.

“Periodic Labs was founded by Liam Fedus, OpenAI’s former VP of research and a key member of the team that launched ChatGPT, and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, a former research scientist at Google’s DeepMind AI division,” reports Bloomberg.

Fedus and Cubuk “are harking back to a time when the tech industry’s leading research operations, including Bell Labs and IBM Research, saw the physical sciences as a vital part of their mission,” NYT writes, quoting Fedus calling Silicon Valley “intellectually lazy.”

Periodic’s approach is different, per an a16z announcement that says it is not relying on “models trained on scientific text” or simulations, but real lab work that will “generate gigabytes of experimental data that exists nowhere else.”

Many, however, profess scientific pursuits, and last year Google DeepMind researchers proved as much with a Nobel Prize for their work on the AlphaFold project to accelerate drug discovery.

Big tech leaders claim their LLMs “will soon achieve significant scientific breakthroughs,” writes NYT, noting “OpenAI and Meta say their technologies are already pushing toward this goal in areas like drug discovery, math and theoretical physics.”

SiliconANGLE reports Period Labs’ funding round had participation from Nvidia, Accel, DST and “prominent tech industry figures” including “Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Google LLC Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and startup investor Elad Gil.” The round was assessed as giving Periodic Labs a valuation of about $1 billion.

NYT credits Cubuk’s team at DeepMind with having “pioneered the GNoME approach to scalable compound discovery with AI,” and says both he and Fedus “realized that today’s frontier models were missing a critical component that was necessary for AI models that could aid scientific reasoning: real world data.”