YouSaid · the spoken record

Liam Fedus

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-04-03
most recent: 2026-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I'm very excited about these interface layers. I think that's going to be such a massive opportunity because, I mean, you know, how many software engineers are there in the world versus people who like the physical world? There's just labor shortages everywhere. So, yeah, I think it's going to be a very interesting decade.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I'm just so excited about the interface of AI systems with the physical world. And we're approaching one angle of that, which is science, engineering. Need that data in order to make those advances, but simply just agency and control of the physical world via robotics is going to be transformative.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think it's look right now we're using almost like more like off the shelf robotics. It's like very simple, very commoditized. Not doing a huge amount of innovation on that front. But again, as these more general robotic systems come to be hit this reliability threshold, it's going to be a massive accelerator for Spinning up new labs as well.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, but it's a huge accelerator The goal for periodic is to generate high quantity, high quality data, diverse data, and automation is assistance to that. So right now we employ people as well and we have autonomous parts that are just very reliable. If you had a dextrous humanoid who could wander into an unstructured lab and make sense and follow instructions reliably, that would be a huge accelerator. Right now, the automation of physical systems requires a very careful design and it's slow, but I think with improvements in robotics, this is just going to accelerate this. But already the reliability of the sort of like hybrid systems is sufficient to produce huge amounts of reliable data, but it's just going to accelerate us further.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models That's right. That's right. But again, the connection of these things to the physical world is going to be so critical because both of the systems are being trained in a closed loop against that domain. So it's a closed loop for doing software engineering, a closed loop for doing AI research. And that's the premise of periodic. Like we need to have these closed loops of actually doing science, of actually doing engineering. And these two, I mean, these two domains are how I think the rest of the world will go with some delay. And this is, again, like the foundational technology that we're super interesting.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a slower outer loop because now the experiment isn't just checking some unit tests passing, but it's checking what was the scaling property? Did this model converge? What's the generalization of the system? That requires GPUs. That requires many hours of experiments. But I think that will.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess building on what I was saying is, I think there's a domain caveat to that. Sure. So rolling forward that software engineering self-improvement, I think you're going to have a system that can write complete repositories, identify bugs, refactor code But it doesn't suddenly understand biology. It's just like there's a domain gap there in knowledge, but even beyond that, there's sets of strategies done in software engineering that differ from scientific or engineering strategies. You're not operating under, it's not like decision making under uncertainty to the same degree. It's like very, verifiable, and that's driven so much of our work. So in that domain, I think it's happening nowish. And I think we'll see the same thing too for AI research.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I guess the point I was making is those fields can actually be quite adjacent. So sometimes the generalization can be non-intuitive. But one way I think about recursive self-improvement is really kind of akin to neural architecture search from roughly 10 years ago. And I think there's a very clear path for software engineering. So these systems have become so incredibly impressive on this domain as a result of huge amounts of data, really cheap, verifiable environments. Like, you know, you can check Unitesco from failing to passing with just a few CPUs, basically instantaneous. There's no domain expertise gap between an AI researcher, software engineer.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, I think one fallacy is thinking about intelligence as a scalar. We've consistently seen these systems have a very odd spikiness, and it's actually possible to architect a system that is world-class on some math domain, but then you could do some perturbations to the questions and actually degrade it substantially. So it's like a bad high school student. And so there's this odd spikiness to these systems.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So on our site, we have decomposed the world into bits and atoms. It's a loose taxonomy, but on bit side, we're really thinking about mid-training, pre-training roles from the AI side, always more infrastructure roles. And on Adam side, like control engineering, system engineering, but also now thinking too about spanning that with like product engineering. A lot of active roles, et cetera.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, some of the scientists who join us are among the best in the world, and it's been absolutely incredible working with them.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we will require more capital. GPUs are so extraordinarily expensive. What's interesting is just the compute costs relative to physical infrastructure is actually surprising where so much money is spent on the compute that the physical infrastructure sometimes is actually lower, but has very large lead times and there's intrinsic difficulty of having these well calibrated, well-functioning physical systems. But from a capital perspective, it's primarily a compute cost.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bring that mindset. And so periodic in this field is really thinking about how do we bring much larger scale sets of experiments to bear on this. And intelligent systems have enabled us. Automation has enabled us. And you really need both. An improvement to automation where you can soon become create bottlenecks in intelligence. And I mean, the scientists very much feel this, where they're not used to working at that level of throughput and they just can't simply make sense of so much data.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seeing firsthand how a field can fundamentally change people who have been doing research for, in some cases, decades in a field and now seeing like, oh, under these systems, under intelligent systems, it could look this very different way. And I mean, I use like an analog to machine learning a lot. Going back to the early Google Brain Days where the frontiers pushed forward by a few GPUs and a few people, now you look at this era where it's really like industrialized and there's dozens, hundreds of researchers working together with hundreds of thousands, millions of GPUs dictated and driven by scaling laws. Everything is about scaling. It's given that predictability. It's allowed us to put huge amounts of capital into this field. And I think the physical sciences, physical engineering will have a very similar property where we establish these scaling properties and”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The iteration between these groups of people, I mean, it's like this is just irreducibly a multidisciplinary problem. We have physicists and chemists working really closely with some of the top AI researchers in the world, working closely with some of the best engineers in the world. And this multidisciplinary close collaboration is just absolutely incredible because”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think what we're trying to do is give humanity this agency for atomic rearrangement synthesis. And we think it's going to just be a huge accelerator. So, I mean, if our physical world could keep up at some fraction to our digital world, I think life will just feel dramatically different.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think, as you're pointing out, you're going from systems that aren't just writing essays, not just writing software, but to literally generating matter. And I think it has pretty profound implications to semiconductors, aerospace, energy. And I think it's incredibly important for can we increase the pace of just like the physical development of the world? I mean, we see how quickly the digital realm is changing. Software engineering now looks wildly different than even six months ago. But I think we see similar opportunities in the physical world. Of course, like atoms are hard. And so you'll have some limits of physics. But just because atoms are hard doesn't mean there's not an order magnitude or two to speed up just making sense of huge amounts of data and getting to solutions more quickly.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're thinking about us ourselves as an intelligence layer. For these companies. So you can think about system of record, control plane for different experiments and getting to solutions. But like you're saying, there is a very interesting aspect of some breakthroughs here could have really high value and it might be more akin to a discovery model like we've seen in biotech and elsewhere. But starting thinking about it just as a software business.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually a quite universal thing as well. And so we've kind of created our little testing ground internally. And now we're sufficiently excited about the tech we've been building and to see this acceleration for advanced manufacturing more broadly.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've begun working very closely with scientists. We've treated periodic as our customer zero and seeing how can we transform how this field of science is done But there's huge opportunities across all of these industries, all these enterprises that are interfacing with the physical world. People who are bottlenecked by materials engineering, process engineering. And again, those are kind of this same natural interfaces where engineers are asking questions about their data. They're trying to find aberrations. They're trying to debug machinery. They're trying to get to a better formulation.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so language models are incredibly powerful. It's a very natural interface. And so we continue to use these. But we think about them almost as like an orchestration layer. So that's sort of a co-pilot assistant, but also like a system that can direct experiments. And it's orchestrating other specialized models as well. So we do construct neural nets that are specially designed for atomic systems where there's like some symmetry awareness. And those have much lower latency and they've been like fine-tuned for that. And so basically you kind of think of this like orchestrating layer that can ingest literature. It can go through our experimental data. It can go through different modalities, but they can also use specialized neural nets. As tools, as reward functions. So it's like an overall system.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you produce a system that has modeled quantum mechanical objects really accurately. It's not really helping much on fluid dynamics or, you know. Like another kind of like level of abstraction. And so the generalization we're seeing is quite good, but there's almost like a first principle, as you can.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decades We have seen internally the greatest advances where we have an abundance of data in some space. And that has led to the highest rate of acceleration internally. But I think you can think of different levels of generalization. And for systems that are strongly governed by quantum mechanical effects, there is some generalization there.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But really important, it's not just like a pool of data, it's this interactive closed-loop system that is so powerful. Once you have the experimental data, you can look through it. You can look for aberrations. You can look for patterns. You can look for consistency with simulation data, with literature, and then that helps drive the next set of experiments. So it's not just a pool of data, it's a very active loop.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like papers, the internet, as you're pointing out However, that's insufficient. One of the engineers on our team was looking at a reported material property. And it was just sort of extractive values from literature. And it was really interesting to see the reported value spanned many orders of magnitude. And so you train an ML system on that and it's like, well, the best you can do is model this distribution, but you're no closer to like a ground truth. And that's where experimental data comes in where you now have a grounding in this.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We use a combination Yeah. So, for example, periodic spends zero effort on improving coding models. We're incredibly impressed by Codex, Cloud Code, and so that's been a huge accelerator for the company, but focused our machine learning efforts where the existing frontiers is not sufficiently good for us. I think going back to the data question, we're leveraging, call it order, tens of trillions of tokens that went into open source models. And that's given us very foundational understanding. But once we start moving into specific discovery areas, chemical spaces, we can see Very high level of sample efficiency. So, the system isn't starting as a randomly initialized neural net. It has a strong prior on the world.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is some generalization from the existing models. So, we don't need to reproduce a system that can understand and write English or write code. So we're kind of like leveraging.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so experiment. I mean, so we have physics simulations and we have experiment. And I think exactly as you're pointing out, ML systems are good on the data you've trained them on, on the tasks you've trained them to do. I think sometimes there's like this mythology of AGI, ASI, RSI. And I think we see increasingly powerful systems, but they do become limited if they don't have access to the raw data to actually make informed decisions.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of coding agents and other agents. And I think those were foundational technologies necessary to then connect these systems to the physical world. Like it was just not possible with the AI technology of 2022.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think just the inevitability of connecting these systems to the physical world, the opinion that I and others held periodic was you're not going to see the same kind of acceleration in science and technology unless you start connecting these things to the physical world. Science ultimately isn't sitting in a room thinking really hard. You have to conduct experiments. You have to learn from them. You have to interface with reality. The creation of ChatGPT in late 2022 was important technology, but it was still far too weak. Like we couldn't have done periodic on technology of that era. I think over the next few years, past that, we saw ever improving models, we saw reasoning, I think like test time inference became really important that led to more reliable error correction, more reliable tool use, and we see like the rise.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're all spitballing ideas like writing bot, coding bot, very natural at the time. Some of our least interesting ideas were a meeting bot. How he would just sit in a Google Meet, take notes, and then send out to-dos after. But John Schulman was very opinionated. He's like, we think we should keep it very general. Let's do chatbot. And that became a large part of the effort for those few months.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so the goal was we need to come up with some productionization of GPT 4. So OpenAI had GPT-4. It was pre-trained and there were some rough post-trains on it. And there's questions about like, how do we turn this incredibly powerful model into products?”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So is that Google for many years, mostly doing architecture work? So was really pushing sparsity that allows for more efficient serving of models at scale and just really pushing the scale of what we could do towards late 2022 really became excited about the creation of products. The technology was getting very compelling. And so I ended up at opening eye with some other Googlers as well.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was 2016, 2017. So Google Brand at that point was still really small and it eventually was subsumed by DeepMind or combined with DeepMind.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And then I was basically in grad school and physics, I was always gravitating towards the machine learning problems. I was looking at particle reconstruction and it's effectively machine learning problems, but it felt if I really wanted to push frontier of machine learning, I should be in computer science. So ended up at Google Brain, was overlapping with the first year residents there. Absolutely remarkable group of people, remarkable period for Google Brain. I mean, this era of when there's the creation of like distributed training strategies, mixture of experts, the transformer. It was a really rich period in that history. And it was a fun kind of like Cambrian era where people were really pushing the frontier with just like a handful of GPUs, really small collaborations. The field was a much, much earlier. And I think there was a lot of diversity and entropy in the research. And it was very fun.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a great way to think about the world. It's like very principled, very 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. 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 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 saying like, hey, I think I could be a huge contributor elsewhere.”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So even further back, I was a physics major in undergrad, spent some time doing dark matter research. We had an apparatus that was directly sensitive to dark matter's direction. So it was very interesting”
2026-04-03 · No Priors · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT