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- Secular changes that mean now is the time
- Source of differentiation:
- data: experimental, simulation? Public vs. private datasets?
- algorithm
- GTM: development of products? Software licensing?
- Self-supervised learning?
- Core value prop?
- Extensibility of approach to other domains?
- Who else is leading?
- Who else should I speak to?
- Spherical harmonics!
- Competitors:
- AlphaFold 3:
- AlphaFold 3: advances without structural information
- Doing 1P drug discovery, partnering with pharma, and releasing a free tool
- Exchange of ligands and metals: scale up something easy, then do the exchange at large scale’
- 2 years’ Runway
- Focused on MOFs
- Don’t need to reinvent
- Activity with Meta → they generate data
- Me:
- OpenAI + other partnerships (AMD, etc.)
- Mission-driven, high-agency
- Use of AI for non-human tasks
- Non-profit co-founder
- startups and large companies
- Backers? Roadmap? Business model?
- societally important work: carbon capture / etc.
- lots of small areas with closed ideas
- open source: build materials that push the entire field forward
- have to show a business case
- big cloud guys w/ deep pockets
- carbon neutral w/ energy through the roof
- sustainability teams
- burning need for new materials / carbon capture / etc.
- Frontier; billion dollar pledge / Stripe / Google/ banks
- pre-purchase agreement
- too early. build pre-Frontier effort?
- we become lighthouse effort
- speak to Andrew Trask about concerted open source effort
- Intersection of technology and strategy
- Help understand where new innovations are going to be useful, and then design business Models around that
- Family plans: US to Europe in 2025. Can change roles earlier.
- Funding:
- final version of investor docs
- closing next week
- set out to raise $20m / 2 years runway
- had a lot of interest
- taken on 30 million
- the more money you have the more you spend
- mix of UK / EU + a Tier 1 fund + smaller US fund with friendly director
- optimized for people rather than brand
- happy with the investor group
- some angels incl. leadership team at GDM (17 investors in first close / + others)
- current plan is to announce on June 18th
- Geoff Hinton on the advisory board
- Yann LeCun from Meta (partnership)
- still being scoped out w/ Meta
- have 15 people soft-hired
- many of them former colleagues / students of Max
- ML and AI: really good bunch of people
- less thought into is commercial operations of the business
- Building a chemistry team
- professor giving 50% of time. build a chemistry team but ‘member of technical staff’
- looking at VP of Engineering - build platforms from the ground up in big co and startups
- good candidates - will build engineering team
- former colleague from google will join focused on partnerships
- taken open professorship in forest university
- number of days with cusp?
- has VP of operations
- offices in Cambridge, Berlin, Amsterdam
- most AI people are in Amsterdam. satellite team in Berlin
- commercial side and business models
- partnership with meta - leading that
- structure partnership with meta
- nader musavi lawyer