... “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.” ...
But Mr. Fedus said such companies were not on a path to true scientific discovery. “Silicon Valley is intellectually lazy” when describing the future of large language models, he said. He and Dr. Cubuk are harking back to a time when the tech industry’s leading research operations, including Bell Labs and IBM Research, saw the physical sciences as a vital part of their mission. ...
Periodic Labs, which has secured over $300 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm a16z and others, has started its work at a research lab in San Francisco. But it plans to build its own lab in Menlo Park, Calif., where robots — physical robots — will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale.
The company’s researchers will organize and guide these experiments. As they do, A.I. systems will analyze both the experimentation and the results. The hope is that these systems will learn to drive similar experiments on their own. ...
“It will not make the discovery on the first try, but it will iterate,” Dr. Cubuk said, meaning it will repeat the process over and over again. “After lots of iteration, we hope to get there faster.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/technology/ai-meta-google-openai-periodic.html