Welcome, humans.

What if I told you someone built a $270 million chemistry AI that started in a backyard trailer lab?

And today, that AI is helping redesign products used by billions of people—from Tylenol to Neutrogena to everyday shampoos.

This is Albert Invent, and founder Nick Talken just walked us through how they're dragging chemistry out of the DaVinci era and into the laptop era.

Here's what blew our minds:

• 1:04 The trailer lab origin story: How Ken (Nick's co-founder) got frustrated that chemistry hadn't changed in 25 years and literally pulled a trailer into his backyard to start over.

• 2:31 Why you can't just slap GPT on chemistry: Albert is trained on 15 million molecular structures, but here's the catch—public data only shows successes. The real breakthroughs come from capturing all the failures that never get published.

• 4:08 What "end-to-end R&D platform" actually means: Before Albert, creating a new shampoo meant walking to a stock room, asking colleagues by the water cooler, and hand-writing experiments in notebooks. Now it's all digitized, searchable, and shareable across global teams.

• 8:40 The data sharing problem: Do enterprise clients resist sharing their chemistry data? Nick's answer might surprise you (spoiler: they're more worried about legal issues than competitive advantages).

• 10:07 Beyond cosmetics: How Albert is being used for sustainable plastics, bio-based materials, and solving supply chain nightmares when tariffs hit.

• 36:06 Is it a data problem or compute problem? Nick's take on what's actually limiting material science innovation right now.

• 37:03 The moonshot vision: Nick wants a world where you can "invent the physical world with a laptop"—the same way you can spin up AWS servers to build digital products today.

• 38:28 The 3D printing question: Will we eventually design experiments on our laptops and print test materials at home? Nick's thoughtful answer on where 3D printing actually makes sense. Bottom line: Chemistry is one of the last major industries still running on paper notebooks and institutional knowledge locked in people's heads. Albert is changing that—and the implications go way beyond better shampoo.

Watch and/or Listen now: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

P.S. Corey's favorite moment was when Nick described chemistry as resembling "when DaVinci was doing chemistry back in the day." That's... not great for a multi-trillion dollar industry. But hey, at least Albert is here now. 🧪

Keep scrolling for four more videos we think you’ll love, and our recap of our epic livestream with Vercel on how to vibecode and launch a real app with V0.

THIS EPISODE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR PARTNER…

Go Premium with the Google Developer Program

You're building with AI, but your dev tools bill keeps climbing while you're still piecing together workflows across five different platforms.

Go premium with Google and unlock the breadth of Google's developer tools, including Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist. Plus, fuel your next big project with up to $540 in Gen AI and Cloud Credits.

For $24.99/month, you get everything in one spot:

• Gemini Code Assist that writes alongside you in your IDE.

• Direct terminal access via Gemini CLI.

• 30 Firebase Studio workspaces for full-stack devs.

• ...And a month of Google AI Pro to test their best models.

The real value? That $540 in credits ($45/month + $500 bonus when you certify) covers way more than the subscription cost.

Plus, you get a free Google Cloud certification voucher (worth $200) and direct consultation time with Google Cloud experts when you hit a wall.

Upgrade to Premium 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…

Four recent interviews you’ll definitely want to check out (pick whatever looks interesting to you and dive in!):

• Otter’s Sam Liang

• Breaking NVIDIA’s GPU Lock-In with Modular: Learn how to run AI models across any hardware (not just NVIDIA) and cut inference costs by up to 70%.

• The Future of Windows in an AI World: See exactly which AI features are coming to Windows, what runs locally vs. cloud, and how to use Copilot in your existing workflow.

• Securing AI (with AI): Learn about the new Security Copilot agents that automate phishing triage and threat detection, and how to prepare for securing your own AI agents.

Last week, we talked to Vercel’s Tom Occhino who showed us how to vibecode with V0. Here are our favorite parts:

• Tom's Product Philosophy & V0 Origin Story (8:00) - Tom explains how his experience at Facebook building React led to Vercel, and why they created V0 to solve the "blank canvas problem" for developers.

• Live Portfolio Tracker Demo (18:02) - Tom starts building a sophisticated financial portfolio tracking app from scratch using just a detailed prompt, showcasing V0 Max's capabilities with Claude Opus.

• One-Click Database Integration (50:12) - Tom demonstrates how to add a Supabase database to an app in under a minute without ever leaving Vercel or creating a separate account - showing the seamless marketplace integration.

• Building The Neuron's Content Hub Live (1:10:41) - After Tom leaves, Corey and Grant build a real RSS reader aggregating The Neuron's blog, newsletter, and YouTube content, showing how accessible the tool is for non-engineers.

And if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do! Click the image below to go to our channel and hit “subscribe” to get notified right when new videos go live.

We have a goal to hit 10K subscribers by the end of the year! If you like learning about AI, and already watch some of our videos, do us a favor and click here to subscribe today. We won’t bite… but sometimes, we do scratch…

Dive deeper with these resources:

• Albert Invent website: albertinvent.com

• [They're hiring across multiple roles if you're interested in helping "invent the physical world"]

Stay curious,

The Neuron Team

P.P.S: Love the newsletter, but don’t want to receive these podcast announcement emails? Don’t unsubscribe — adjust your preferences to opt out of them here instead.