Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video with
, founder of Puraffinity, a company that removes forever chemicals from water.Here are a few points that stand out for me:
Every cutting-edge GPU fab uses a huge amount of virgin PFAS; the chip boom is literally built on forever chemicals.
Graduate-track openings “have fallen off a cliff – the first question is: can an agent do it instead?”
It’s easier to take a materials-science PhD and up-skill them in AI than the reverse.
Today Henrik would build the same company with four to eight people instead of 200. (Donkeycorns, my favourite topic!)
Gen-AI is “a new continent of PhD-level labour that costs 25 ¢ per hour and works 24/7.”
Henrik’s moonshot vision? A $400 M full-stack AlphaFold-for-Materials to wipe out pollution – in-house synthesis, testing, scale-up & regulatory.
Real bottleneck in materials science isn’t AI, it’s testing. Real-world validation is now the gating factor: four weeks to three months to see if a material actually works.
My reflections
Two things stand out for me here. One is the trend I see everywhere: progress requires fewer people and more compute. Great for progress, less great for people who never get hired. Also, while everyone seem to have a preference for hiring experienced people if they are hiring at all, where will the experienced people come from later if juniors aren’t getting jobs?
Another is that AI in materials science holds an incredible promise and at the same time creates new problems. Again: great new materials, but to make them we’ll have to use up water and make even more forever chemicals to make AI chips.
Someone said, I forgot who, that the defining characteristic of our capitalism is that we’re trying to make money to insulate ourselves from problems we created by making money. It feels this way with AI: we badly need to keep making tech and scientific progress to solve our current problems and yet it’s the pursuit of this progress is what largely got us into this situation in the first place.
When this pattern shows up on an individual level, the right but painful decision is often to cut the losses, accept the pain and start the journey back to normality, but it doesn’t seem remotely possible for a civilisation. And I’m not sure it’d be a good idea: personally, I’ll take the world with PFAS, AI and capitalism over the times when there was no pain relief for surgeries and life expectancy was 30-something years.
P.S. Today I learned that to invite the guest from the audience to join us on stage, they need to be on mobile, not laptop, so if you’d like to join a future conversation, make sure you join a future Substack Live on your smartphone.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome
01:18 Henrik’s path: Denmark → China → Imperial College → Puraffinity
03:06 State-of-the-art in AI × materials science: sparse data, non-linear physics, the Alchemy consortium
05:53 Why scale-up kills battery & materials start-ups: manufacturing reality vs. in-silico dreams
08:49 Case study – removing PFAS from water: 4-week to 3-month test cycles as the new bottleneck
11:33 The next 3-5 yrs: better hybrid models, not just more compute
13:30 Hidden cost of AI boom: every prompt guzzles water & chips need “tons of PFAS”
16:14 “Vibe-coding” materials & building full-stack labs with <10 people
18:46 How Henrik would found “Puraffinity 2.0” today – 1/10th the head-count, 1/3 the capital
22:00 The perception gap: why half the world shrugs at GPT-4-level tools
24:00 $400 M moonshot: an “AlphaFold for pollution”
26:22 Junior hiring is broken; why sector experts → tech beats techies → sector
29:33 Fractional careers, representation & the risk of widening gaps
32:30 Funding squeeze & the new bar for product revenue
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