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Brain lab

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From Molecupedia, the encyclopedia of very small things
Term for companies that build artificial intelligence for science
This article is about a term used by Molecular Reality Corporation for developers of artificial intelligence. For laboratories that study or connect to actual brains, see below.
Banner: blue brain icon and the words THE BRAIN on black.
Banner: red eye icon and the words THE EYE on black.
The two column headings Molecular Reality uses when it draws the comparison as a chart

Brain lab is a name for the companies that Molecular Reality Corporation describes as building "the brain": large artificial intelligence models meant to do science, such as designing drugs, discovering materials and modeling cells and tissues. Company copy calls them "the brain", "the brains" and "brain builders", and in its longest form "Megacap 'Brain' AI Labs".[1] Five companies are named in the brain column of company materials: Isomorphic Labs, Lila Sciences, Periodic Labs, Bioptimus and CuspAI.[2] In a wider sense the term covers the frontier laboratories, such as Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, whose general models company copy calls "the big centralized reasoning model".[1]

Molecular Reality casts itself as the counterpart, "the eye": a maker of nanopore sensors that measure molecules one at a time and produce the physical data that, in the company's argument, the brains cannot find on the internet. Since August 19, 2026, the front page of its websites has carried the sentence "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye."[3] The same materials that name the brain labs also list them as eventual customers for the eye's data.[1]

The term has no connection with neuroscience. Company copy does not use it for laboratories that study brains or build devices that connect to them.

Terminology

Main article: Everybody's racing to build the brain

The phrase grew out of a presentation script in which the speaker says "Everyone right now is racing to build the brain", explains the brain as "the big centralized reasoning model", and ends the thought with "We're building the eyes."[1] A glossary attached to the script defines the contrast: "mega-cap labs build the centralized reasoning 'brain'; we build the distributed sensing 'eyes'", a layer of sensors the glossary calls "the missing input layer". A second gloss puts it in terms of hardware: "Most funded players build computational models (the brain). MR builds the physical sensor (the eyes) that generates the data those models need."[1]

The number of organs varies from document to document. On the front page there is one brain and one eye.[3] The script has one brain and several eyes, and an August 2026 one-page summary has several of each: "In the quest to 'solve all diseases', everybody's racing to build the brains. We're building the eyes."[1][a] Other versions include "the brain reads the internet, the eyes read reality" and "Every brain needs eyes".[1]

"Brain builders", with or without a hyphen, is the usual name for the companies themselves, as in "AI 'brain builders'" and "The brain-builders will all need eyes."[1] The longest form, "Megacap 'Brain' AI Labs", heads a list of the company's eventual customers and is followed by four names: Lila, Isomorphic, CuspAI and Bioptimus.[1][b]

Origins

The comparison is younger than the company. Molecular Reality's long-range plan, written in 2022 under the title "Our North Star", defines its goal as "Molecular sensing with the scale, economics, and universal adoption of electricity, running water, and internet."[5] When Kent Kemmish, the company's founder, posted that document to the company's members' site in March 2026, he framed it against artificial intelligence, writing of "AI sucking all the oxygen out of any room where The Future is the topic of discussion" and calling the plan "a better vision of the future than trusting that AI will cure all diseases and also not make us extinct".[6]

From late June to mid-August 2026 the company's front page had a tab of its own for RLMF, whose text turned the AI laboratories from rivals into future users of the company's data: "We knew that advanced AI would come soon, and that it would need what we were building toward."[7] A July 2026 plan for a presentation gave its cover the line "The eyes for the AI brain."[1] An August one-page summary used the plural sentence about brains and eyes, and on August 19 the singular version replaced the whole front page, above the video of an eye.[1][3] In September a short teaser repeated it with a capital letter.[1]

The five brain builders

When company materials draw the comparison as a chart, a column headed THE BRAIN lists five companies and a column headed THE EYE lists one entry: "utility-scale molecular sensing with programmable solid-state pores".[1] The speaker's note for the slide describes the left column as "Brilliant teams, all building the brain: AI for drug discovery, materials, biology." Of the right column it says: "That column has one entry, and it's ours."[1] The nanopore companies, Oxford Nanopore among them, are kept on a separate appendix slide.[1] The last column of the table below gives the caption printed under each name in the chart.

Companies in the brain column
Company Public since What it builds, in its own words Caption in the chart
Isomorphic Labs 2021 Drug discovery with machine learning, "building on and beyond the Nobel-winning AlphaFold system"; set up as "a new Alphabet company" and based in London[8][4][9] "AlphaFold + drug discovery AI"
Lila Sciences 2025 "Scientific Superintelligence": AI models joined to autonomous laboratories of its own, which it calls AI Science Factories[10] "AI for scientific research"
Periodic Labs 2025 "AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate"; one goal is superconductors "that work at higher temperatures than today's materials"[11][12] "AI-native biotech platform"
Bioptimus 2024 "the World Model of Biology": H-Optimus-0, an open 1.1-billion-parameter model of tissue images (2024), and M-Optimus (December 2025), which combines tissue images, RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and clinical data[13][14][15] "Foundation models for biology"
CuspAI 2024 "AI-powered materials discovery"; incorporated in Cambridge, England, in March 2024[16][17] "AI-powered materials discovery"

Lila Sciences uses the same anatomy about itself. Its home page says "LILA's advanced AI model is the brain", and calls its laboratory instruments "the body".[10] Molecular Reality's materials enlist another member of the column for the eye: "As Periodic Labs itself argues, AI now needs physical, experimental verification."[1] Periodic Labs' own slogan is "From bits to atoms."[11]

Isomorphic Labs has the closest tie to a frontier laboratory. Alphabet announced it in November 2021 to carry the methods of AlphaFold, the protein-structure model built at DeepMind, into drug design, and in January 2024 it announced research collaborations with the drug makers Eli Lilly and Novartis.[8][18] Bioptimus trained H-Optimus-0 on "more than 500,000 H&E stained whole slide histology images" and released it under the Apache 2.0 license.[14]

Frontier laboratories

In its wider sense company copy applies the term to the developers of general-purpose models. One slide begins "The brains are starving for physical data." and goes on: "Frontier models have exhausted the internet's data."[1] Google DeepMind belongs to both groups: it built AlphaFold, from which Isomorphic Labs was spun out, and it builds the Gemini models.[8] OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the maker of Claude, complete the usual list of frontier laboratories.

The company's main proposal for working with the brains borrows from them. Chat models such as ChatGPT were tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback, in which people rank a model's answers and the rankings become the reward the model learns to maximize.[19][20] Molecular Reality's counterpart, RLMF or "Reinforcement Learning with Molecular Feedback", takes the reward from a nanopore measurement in place of the human raters.[7] Its public description says that "Even the most intelligent AI systems will need to somehow measure the world of molecules" and that "The epic quest to 'cure all diseases' with AI is unlikely to succeed without it."[7] The company's field guide labels RLMF and the planned nanopore world model "proposals, not products".[21]

Molecular Reality's own software had a chatbot named after the organ by 2022. The control panel of its game Maxine's Quest, as described in December of that year, included a bias knob, a "zapper stick", a "potion platter" and a chatbot called the "brainbot".[22]

The eye

Main article: The Seeing Eye
The 12-second loop on the company's front page. Its alt text reads "Eye with protein emerging from pupil."

Against the brain the company sets its sensors. One slide puts the idea in five words, "The eye is a programmable hole.", and then explains it: a solid-state nanopore "a few nanometres wide" reads single molecules "as dips in ionic current", and the company's version is mechanical, with stacked membranes that slide over one another to change the opening.[1][c]

The argument for why the brains will need it starts with the data their best-known model learned from. In the company's words, "AlphaFold 3 learned mostly from the half-century-old Protein Data Bank".[1] The Protein Data Bank was established in 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory and held seven structures at the start. Its entries are structures determined by experiment, mostly by X-ray crystallography.[23] On the company's reading, the next generation of models will need measurements no archive yet holds, and of the brain builders "None of them is building distributed physical sensors."[1] The same slide calls their laboratories centralized "AI science cathedrals". Against them the company proposes small sensors in homes, sinks and drains, on the principle that "The brain-builders will all need eyes."[1] Its materials describe the eventual sale as racks of pores "plus API access to real-time physical training data" for "the 'brain builders'".[1]

Kemmish keeps the AI laboratories inside the argument without opposing them. In the same March 2026 post he wrote that "AI is awesome, terrifying, astounding, and useful."[6] His essay introducing the company's game answers the objection that superintelligent AI will cure every disease on its own: "short of genie-level magic emerging from AI systems, I don't see how they'll cure all diseases without what we're building."[24]

The company's imagery runs to many eyes. Its Iridian gallery is subtitled "197 Views of the Seeing Eye".[25] In August 2026 the company's field guide gave the size of the eye in one sentence: "Today we have one instrument in one lab."[21] The instrument is an EDR4 patch-clamp amplifier made by the Italian company Elements srl, on a bench in the American Southwest.[2][21]

Reception

The Picoampere covered the new front page on August 21, 2026, under the headline "The Startup That Says Everyone Else Is Building the Brain". It explained that "the brain" means the companies training models to do science, listed the five companies of the brain column, and described the eye as the company's nanopore, at the time a single instrument streaming from one bench.[2]

Not to be confused with

Company copy never uses "brain" for neuroscience, although the brain column in its charts is illustrated with a drawing of one. Laboratories that work on real brains include neurotechnology companies such as Neuralink, whose implanted brain-computer interface records from 1,024 electrodes on 64 threads and was first implanted in a human volunteer in January 2024.[26][27] They also include connectomics projects, which map brains one synapse at a time. In October 2024 the FlyWire consortium published the complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain, with 139,255 neurons and about 54.5 million synapses,[28] and in April 2025 the MICrONS project published a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex containing about 200,000 cells and 523 million synapses.[29]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The phrase in single quotation marks is close to the stated mission of Isomorphic Labs, the first company in the brain column, which is "to one day solve all disease with the help of AI".[4]
  2. ^ The two-word form used as this article's title does not occur in company copy. Periodic Labs, the fifth company in the brain column, is not on the customer list.
  3. ^ The mechanism is described in Sliding occlusion and Juxtapore.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
  2. ^ a b c Dev Okonkwo-Hale (August 21, 2026). "The Startup That Says Everyone Else Is Building the Brain". The Picoampere.
  3. ^ a b c "Molecular Reality Corporation". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 19, 2026.
  4. ^ a b "Isomorphic Labs". Isomorphic Labs. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  5. ^ "Our North Star: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
  6. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
  7. ^ a b c "RLMF". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
  8. ^ a b c "Introducing Isomorphic Labs". Isomorphic Labs. November 2021.
  9. ^ "Inside Isomorphic Labs' Lausanne office". Isomorphic Labs. November 13, 2025.
  10. ^ a b "Lila Sciences". Lila Sciences. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  11. ^ a b "Periodic Labs". Periodic Labs. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  12. ^ "AI Scientists in the Lab". Marginal Revolution. October 4, 2025.
  13. ^ "Bioptimus". Bioptimus. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  14. ^ a b "H-optimus-0". Hugging Face. Bioptimus. 2024.
  15. ^ "Bioptimus Unveils M-Optimus, a World Model for Biology" (Press release). Bioptimus. December 17, 2025.
  16. ^ "CuspAI: AI-powered materials discovery". CuspAI. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  17. ^ "CUSP AI LIMITED". Companies House. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  18. ^ "Isomorphic inks deals with Eli Lilly and Novartis for drug discovery". TechCrunch. January 7, 2024.
  19. ^ Ouyang, Long et al. (2022). "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback". arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2203.02155.
  20. ^ "Introducing ChatGPT". OpenAI. November 30, 2022.
  21. ^ a b c "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
  22. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
  23. ^ "History". RCSB Protein Data Bank. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  24. ^ Kemmishtree (March 2026). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
  25. ^ "Iridian". Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  26. ^ Dorkenwald, Sven et al. (2024). "Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain". Nature 634: 124-138. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07558-y.
  27. ^ MICrONS Consortium (2025). "Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex". Nature 640: 435-447. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08790-w.
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