A U.K. startup aiming to use AI to discover new chemicals and materials has signed up two “godfathers of AI,” as well as a leading AI policy advisor and a renowned materials science researcher, as advisors. It has also quietly hired a clutch of AI talent away from Google and its sister companies.
CuspAI, which was founded last year and is based in Cambridge, England, has appointed both Geoffrey Hinton, the former Google AI researcher who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his pioneering work on artificial neural networks, and Yann LeCun, another AI luminary who serves as the chief AI scientist at Meta, to its scientific advisory board.
LeCun was once Hinton’s post-doctoral student at the University of Toronto and both scientists are widely regarded as “godfathers” in the field of AI, having developed some of the basic algorithmic methods that lie behind the current AI boom. They were also co-recipients of the 2018 Turing Award (considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computer science).
LeCun said he was excited to help CuspAI as it tries to discover new materials that can help advance environmental sustainability, including chemicals that can help with carbon capture and storage, water purification, and create better performing batteries and more energy-efficicent computer chips. “The application of machine learning and modern AI to material science is one of the most promising approaches to addressing the biggest challenges faced by humanity,” he said in a statement provided to Fortune. “CuspAI's combination of frontier AI and materials expertise is exactly what's needed to tackle these challenges."
In addition to Hinton and LeCun, CuspAI has appointed as a scientific advisor Kristin Persson, a materials science researcher University of California Berkeley who was last year named a Distinguished Science Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy. She leads the Materials Project, a multinational effort to use machine learning to discover all the properties of inorganic materials and make the data, as well as the underlying algorithms used to perform the analysis, publicly-available. The company also appointed Verity Harding, a former Google DeepMind head of public policy who is now the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the University of Cambridge, to its advisory board.
