AI Scientists Are Here: Autonomous Labs & Synthesis Superintelligence — Periodic Labs

Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk of Periodic Labs explain why scientific discovery requires physical experiments rather than more internet data alone, and how they are building autonomous labs where AI systems reason under noise and uncertainty. The conversation covers reinforcement learning grounded in experiments, the materials discovery loop from prediction to synthesis to characterization, the limits of DFT, why physics remains unsolved, negative results as training data, scaling autonomous labs, and the broader goal of synthesis superintelligence aimed at discovering new superconductors, magnets, and batteries.