$300M Raised by Periodic Labs for AI Robot Drug Mixers

0:28What's going on everyone, it's Bluff here and we're driving through the states in the Bluffmobile You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this, even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, This is your sign. Start free at rss.com.

1:04Today on the podcast, we're talking about a giant fundraising round of$300 million that has recently been raised for Periodic Labs, which is a brainchild of Google Brain and top open AI researchers. Basically, it's bringing AI research to robotics and mixing compounds, scientific discovery. It's all very exciting stuff. But we're going to talk about a faux pas that happened with a post from OpenAI as well. So it's a very interesting story. We're going to get into it. But before we do, Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community? Yeah, every single week we record an exclusive video that we post over and an episode that we post over on our school community.

1:47This week it was test driving the Comet browser, essentially using it to go and complete a Gentic task. It used to be about$200 a month. that came out of perplexity. They made their own browser to compete with Google Chrome. You can just go tell it to do things and it will go click around and actually do stuff. Why Google Chrome doesn't do this, I don't know. OpenAI has tried to do this with agents. I don't feel like they really accomplished it because it has some glitches and maybe it's getting better with the agents side of ChatGPT, but it didn't seem like I never could really quite get it to do everything I wanted.

2:20I tested out the perplexity browser and was blown away by some things. Then there's some things I think they could work on. We're going to cover all of that in the video on the AI Hustle School community. So if you wanna check that out, you go check it out there. But yeah, there's over 300 members, or close to 100 videos. We make them every single week. Hope it's a ton of help. All right, let's get into what's going on with Periodic Labs. This is crazy. Actually, this is one of the craziest drama backstories that I will give you on a company raising money. So obviously these are big researchers from OpenAI and from Google Brain.

2:55I'll read you the tweet that set off basically a feeding frenzy of VC money that raised them$300 million. Were they bait and switching the VCs? Were they tricking them? Were they bamboozling them? I'm not going to make any claims, but I'll read you the tweet and tell you the story. And this is crazy. So William Fetus, who originally made this tweet, said, he said, he just posted a tweet that said, this is what I sent to my colleagues at OpenAI. He said, hi, all. I made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI as an employee, but I'm looking forward to work closely together as a partner going forward, contributing to the mission of OpenAI and working with world-class teams to create and improve chat GPT has been an experience of a lifetime.

3:36But I've gotten really excited about AI for science. My undergrad was in physics, and I'm keen to apply this technology there because AI for science is one of the most strategically important areas to OpenAI and achieving ASI. He then goes on to say in his tweet, OpenAI is planning to invest and partner with my new company, so I'll see you all around. This is the line that a lot of people, I don't know, this is the very interesting part of the story. Allegedly, OpenAI was going to invest in this. He said, thanks to all of the leadership who believed in me early on, especially Sam, Greg, and Mark.

4:07Thank you, everyone, on post-training, and to all of our collaborators across research and product. I miss working with so many of you, but we'll be cheering you on. Post-training has been amazing. roster of talent leader and leaders who will contribute to drive its success. Okay. So he says he's going to start this new company. And if you're wondering like what the company actually does, it's kind of interesting. We'll go into more detail on the show, but like essentially they have a robotic arm, have chat GPT or an AI model that is going to come up with like, hey, we want to discover new compounds for drugs or for other things.

4:37It will recommend the compounds and drugs. It has a robotic arm that is going to go and move those compounds together and mix them. and then it has an LLM go and analyze the results of the particular drug that was created or produced. So it's a very interesting idea. The thing that just got me like so fascinated was, I mean, basically this post where he said opening, I was going to invest in them. And then you have Rune who, I don't know if it's like confirmed. I swear Rune is like Sam Altman's burner account. I could be wrong, but you know, Rune said, good luck, Nobel prize soon. Logan Kilpatrick over at Google, who has been on some of my shows in the past, said huge congrats on the great run.

5:18It's time to build. Cash, who used to work at X, said have fun. You deserve it. So like a lot of really big names are commenting on this. And obviously he says that OpenAI is going to invest. So what was the outcome of this tweet and him kind of saying that OpenAI was going to invest and come in? Well, the outcome of it was that he was actually able to raise a ton of VC money from this. And what happened was OpenAI never actually invested in this round at all, which is, I guess, just for a lot of people, pretty startling. So according to them, they had more term sheets than they could handle. Apparently, VCs were pitching them, writing them like writing their company love letters, doing all sorts of crazy stuff, basically just begging them to take their money.

6:10And they raised$300 million, basically from this tweet that came out. So I don't know, Jamie, what's your take on this? Did they really have investment from OpenAI lined up? Did OpenAI pull back? Did they decide they didn't need OpenAI? Like what's going on? I don't know, man. I think that's, I mean, that's a little bit shady to be honest, but I think, you know, we don't know what happened behind the scenes. They could have been planning to and then just decided that they wanted to be a competitor and have their own version of this. I think the technology is really a great use case as far as research and being able to use AI for reasoning and also scientific development.

6:52So they developed an automatic robot-powered lab, and they were able to create 41 new compounds from recipes suggested by language models. It's really, it's a cool thing because you have language models now interacting with robotics, you know, communicating together. That's kind of a huge step forward, you know, as long as the, you know, reasoning power actually is there and it's not actually fabricated. like we talked in another episode about if they're not just pulling data from other articles, if they're actually attempting new breakthroughs and making new breakthroughs. I think it's really could be an amazing development for the science in medical world.

7:34But yeah, I don't know. What do you think? One thing that I was reading about it that was fascinating is they said, even the failed experiments are actually very useful. So in the past, it's like, you know, you're trying to make a compound for something and you try, it fails, you move on, right? You don't, like, basically the scientific community is not incentivized to share all of the failed experiments they do because, like, they're incentivized by success, right? If you publish a paper that shows you did something, you can go get a grant and you can get more money. That's basically, like, what the scientific community is motivated by.

8:06Either a company is going to fund it or a government grant is going to fund it, but you've got to publish a paper. You have to achieve something successful. If the experiment's not a success, it doesn't get covered very much. What they're saying is every single experiment that they're trying, they're documenting and they're including it into their AI model. And they said, this is just, it's like an incredible data set. Because if they're trying all these new compounds and all these different things, whether they work or not, it'll be documented. It gets added into the model. It's retrained. And now it knows, okay, like these things didn't work.

8:34And this is probably why. So now not only does it have all the papers that have been published on things that did work, now it's going to have all the things that didn't work. Why? And that just gets it to achieving things even faster. So I think this is really exciting and definitely gets past some of the incentives in the scientific community that probably aren't very aligned with progress. One thing that I mean, as far as where the company's at today, Periodic Labs has already set up their lab. They're working with experimental data simulations and they're testing a bunch of their predictions.

9:02Apparently, their main initial mission. So they have one initial goal, which is pretty interesting, and that is to find new superconductor materials, which is, you know, could improve superconductors. It could power the next era of, you know, potent and, you know, lower energy consuming tech. But if that happens, that would be an absolute goldmine if they could if they could truly crack that. I believe there's a paper that came out like two years ago where someone said they thought they did it and it turned out to be fake. is this is like um this is a very very crazy area where if they're able to accomplish this they'll make a lot of money so i think they're doing the moonshot and i think uh it makes a lot of sense especially if they're raising money they got to tell them like look we're gonna do this moonshot make a lot of money we're we you know we're kind of piloting this concept over on open ai now we're gonna go out and do it full-time ourselves so yeah i think this is absolutely fascinating everything about this story is fascinating from the fact that opening i said they were gonna invest to they didn't they raised 300 million dollars and the fact that they're they're kind of public publicizing that they're going for new superconductor materials as their first their first mission yeah i mean it all sounds very science fictiony and like not very realistic but uh this just came to mind because this is had been a development you know within the past years i'd bet past 10 years but you know they had originally came out with a lithium ion battery which was kind of groundbreaking with its capabilities you know charging things like that But then they decided to, I think the newest development, the next level is the lithium LIPO4 or whatever.

10:32It's the, basically the updated, it's a different compound, same metals, different compound. And it, the battery life is, you know, so much longer. It gets a lot more charge cycles out of it. It charges way faster. And so it's kind of like, because they mix that new compound, now they have a material that is much more superior. So that's kind of what sounds like what they're trying to do with the superconductors and maybe chip building and AI. So it's all very interesting. It's really exciting to see. So I think it is, you know, a valid company. And it's not like just a Ponzi scheme or something.

11:04It's a real, you know, a real company, which is good. It's just that the tweet is a very interesting component to the story. Definitely. A couple other things that I do think are interesting in relation to this. we know that different players inside of the big AI companies are all kind of working in a direction of more AI science. So last month, the OpenAI VP, Kevin Whale, he was over on LinkedIn, and he said that he was launching a new OpenAI for Science unit over at OpenAI. And he said that he was going to, quote, build the next great scientific instrument, an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery.

11:41So this is something that a lot of players are working on. So it's going to be really interesting to see where that goes. The last thing I wanted to bring up, which I did think was pretty interesting, was I mentioned one of the investors that tried to get in on this deal wrote them a love letter to the company, which I thought was kind of funny. And that investor actually did not get in on the deal. They never let him in, although they did say it was very flattering, which is hilarious. But the people that are in on this deal, Andresen Horwitz, DST, NVIDIA's venture capital arm, which is Nventures, Acel, and then Jeff Bezos, Elad Gill, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Dean.

12:17So, like, basically, I think the deal looks so good and so juicy, and they were coming out of the two biggest firms, and they already had OpenAI's commitment lined up. They just got money from, like, the absolute top-tier VCs and investors. I mean, Eric Schmidt from Google, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, NVIDIA, and A16Z in a cell. It's basically just absolute tier one investors. They didn't need opening eyes money or anyone else's. So this is fascinating. I'm going to be excited to see where this company goes and if they're able to live up to the hype. I sure hope they are, but they got$3 million, so they're going to be able to do some impressive stuff.

12:50It'll be fun to follow along. Everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. We're really flattered. Our show has been rising in the business category in the Apple podcast charts. And the number one thing that we just ask you, if you wouldn't mind, do us a favor to help more people find the show would be to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. It helps the show out a ton. We really appreciate them all. We read them all. And it helps more amazing people find us. So if you wouldn't mind doing that, we would appreciate it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go check out the AI Hustle School community and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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14:02With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.