AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus

Today I know priors, we're talking with Liam Fettis. 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, etc, using AI? Very exciting topic and excited to be talking with them today. Liam, thank you so much for joining 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 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, like, what got you here? And Yeah. So even further back, I was a physics major, in undergrad. Spent some time doing dark matter research. We're we had a apparatus that was directionally sensitive to dark matter's direction. Mhmm. So it was very interesting. Why why are those sorry, interrupt, but I'd love to come back to this, but why are there so many physicists in AI right now? So you look at Dario Modi who runs, Anthropic. Of course. Yeah. You look at Adam Brown at Google, you look at a variety of people and they all kinda have these physics backgrounds. Yeah. My old manager, Joshia, also in physics and philanthropic. Yeah. Why why do you think that is? I think it's a great way to think about the world. It's, like, very principled, very, like, hard nosed scientists, very careful. And I don't know. I think it's just it's such an incredible field. You have such high leverage in computer science, in AI. Mhmm. And so I think a lot of physicists were seeing that, 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 the new apparatus for, you know, pushing the next energy frontier. And I think a lot of physicists were looking at their skill set and looking at the progress elsewhere and and saying, like, hey. I think I could be a huge contributor elsewhere. Mhmm. It's just been fascinating to see, like, string theorists and people working on buckles and all sorts of effects, like, kind of moving into …