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Periodic Labs founders on 'synthesis superintelligence' and autonomous labs
In a Latent Space podcast interview, Periodic Labs co-founders Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk laid out their "synthesis superintelligence" thesis: rather than only training on internet data, the lab grounds reinforcement learning environments in real physical experiments so models can reason over noisy, incomplete and scarce measurements while predicting, synthesizing and characterizing materials. They argue failed experiments and negative results may be the most valuable training data, and that giving every lab instrument "a 140 IQ" could compress decades of scientific trial-and-error into months. They also say even future frontier models will still need to run real experiments.