Liam Fedus

In January 2021, he submitted the paper “Switch Transformers” to arXiv as first author with Barret Zoph and Noam Shazeer, proposing a simplified sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) routing approach for scaling language models to trillion-parameter size.⁠[1]

According to Maginative, he joined OpenAI in 2022 after leaving Google. A deal announcement by the law firm Wilson SonsiniWilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiWilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (known as Wilson Sonsini) is a law firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, founded in 1961 and known for serving technology, life sciences, and other growth companies and their investors; it served as counsel on the initial public offerings of companies including Apple, Netscape, Google, and Tesla. As of December 2025 the firm had more than 1,000 lawyers, and its 2025 revenue was $1.4 billion.Open the full entry describes him as one of the co-creators of ChatGPT.⁠[2][3]

The same report says he was promoted to vice president of research in fall 2024, heading post-training, the stage in which models are refined after their initial training.⁠[2]

In March 2025, he announced that he was leaving OpenAI to start a company applying artificial intelligence to materials science. In a post on X he said his undergraduate degree was in physics and that OpenAI planned to invest in and partner with the new company; OpenAI also confirmed his departure to the media.⁠[2]

On September 30, 2025, Periodic Labs, which he co-founded with Ekin Dogus Cubuk, who had led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry, announced a $300 million seed round led by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry, with participants including Felicis, DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry, NVIDIA and Accel.⁠[3][4]

According to reports, the company plans to build closed-loop, self-driving laboratories in which AI agents propose hypotheses and run experiments, with an initial focus on finding superconductors that work at higher temperatures.⁠[4]

A HumanX conference speaker profile describes him as co-founder and co-CEO of Periodic Labs; the company’s website describes itself as an AI research and deployment company accelerating science through AI models and autonomous labs, and lists him among its team members.⁠[5][6]

OpenAI: Official website: https://openai.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Periodic Labs: Official website: https://periodic.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/LiamFedus (opens in a new window)⁠[2]