Periodic Labs, a new startup by one of OpenAI’s most respected researchers, Liam Fedus, and his former Google Brain colleague, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, came out of stealth last month with an enormous $300 million seed round . It was led by Felicis and included a who’s who of angels and other top VCs.

The startup began when Fedus had a conversation with Cubuk (whose friends call him “Doge”) about seven months ago. Cubuk was one of Google Brain’s foremost machine learning and material science researchers. After endless Silicon Valley takes on how GenAI would radically change scientific discovery , they decided that the pieces were finally in place to make this a reality. Or at least to found a startup that attempted it.

“There are a few things that happened in the LLM field, in experimental s

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