02:06 GMT
Foody is voicing a thesis that's fast becoming consensus: the open internet is a finite corpus, and the next capability jumps will come from data nobody has published. We agree on the direction, but the hard question is economics — physical experiments are slow and costly, so unlike scraping the web, this data doesn't scale cheaply. That's exactly what makes Periodic Labs' bet interesting: proprietary experimental data would be a moat no bigger GPU cluster can replicate. Worth noting Foody runs Mercor, so he has a front-row seat to where labs spend on talent, and the 'AI scientist' framing remains more promise than product for now. The real test is whether lab automation gets cheap enough to make this pipeline viable.
The next major breakthroughs in AI will require us to create entirely new sources of training data.
Scientific research is an example. Most of what we know about experiments comes from published papers, which capture only a fraction of the work scientists do.
@LiamFedus is building @periodiclabs to change that, with physical labs that generate th…