Fedus: Periodic Labs launches as a software intelligence layer, not discovery model
Liam Fedus · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · Apr 3, 2026 · at 14:42
Liam Fedus, co-founder of Periodic Labs, discusses the company's commercialization strategy and business model with Elad Gil.
0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 28.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, you know, 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 our, just as a software business.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Liam Fedus
Fedus: Physical sciences and engineering will follow machine learning scaling laws
“And I think the physical sciences, physical engineering, Will have a very similar property where we establish these scaling properties and Bring that mindset.”
Fedus: Intelligence is not scalar; AI shows extreme, non-intuitive spikiness
“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 …”
Fedus: Self-improving software AI will not automatically generalize to domains like biology
“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. Right? It's just like there's a domain gap ther…”
Fedus: Recursive self-improvement is happening in software and entering AI research
“So, In that domain, I think it's happening now-ish. And I think we'll see the same thing too for AI research. 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? Di…”
Fedus: John Schulman steered OpenAI toward a general chatbot over narrow tools
“And we're all spitballing ideas, like writing bot coding bot. You know, very natural at the time. Some of our least interesting ideas were a meeting bot, so it would just sit in a Google Meet, take notes, and then send out, like, to-dos after. But John Schulma…”