The Rise of the NeoLab - Radical Ventures x Nebius

The Rise of the NeoLab: An evening with Çağlar Gülçehre, Ed Hughes, Jeff Hawke and Simon Kohl

Hosted by Radical Ventures and Nebius.

About the Event

AI research is fragmenting into a constellation of new labs each betting on a different architecture, modality, or approach to unlocking the next breakthrough.

Join Radical Ventures and Nebius on Wednesday, 30 September in King’s Cross for an invite-only gathering of AI researchers and founders exploring a central question: what will be the next breakthroughs in AI and what will it take to build them?

Radical’s NeoLabs report mapped nearly 100 emerging AI labs across architecture, modality, funding and technique. This evening brings some of that map into one room, with four of the researchers and founders building at the frontier.

The evening will bring together leading AI researchers for two fireside conversations with founders from Odyssey, Inherent, DeepMind, and Latent Labs, moderated by Radical Ventures Partners Rich Kotite and Aaron Rosenberg. The discussion will explore world models, text diffusion, and AI for scientific discovery, alongside the technical bets shaping these labs, the hardest problems still to solve, and what it takes to build an independent research organisation.

Both conversations will include audience Q&A, followed by food, drinks and informal discussion with the speakers and fellow researchers.

Meet the Speakers

• Çağlar Gülçehre: Founder of a stealth NeoLab. Focused on building the next generation of efficient language models. A co-inventor of the GRU and a pioneer of neural machine translation, his research has spanned AlphaStar, reinforcement learning, efficient model architectures, and large-scale AI systems. A leading researcher in text diffusion and generative model architectures, he brings experience from DeepMind, Microsoft AI, and academia to developing a new generation of fast, efficient, text diffusion-based language models.

• Ed Hughes: Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Inherent. Previously a co-lead of Google DeepMind’s AI Scientist team, Ed helped build the Genie 1 world model and contributed to AlphaProof. His research spans reinforcement learning, cooperative AI and cultural evolution in language models. At Inherent, he is building AI that discovers new scientific knowledge.

• Jeff Hawke: Co-founder & CTO, Odyssey. A founding researcher and former VP of Technology at Wayve, Jeff helped pioneer end-to-end learning for autonomous driving. With a PhD from Oxford and deep experience deploying AI in the real world, he now leads Odyssey’s development of foundation world models -- systems that learn to understand, predict and simulate the physical world.

• Simon Kohl: Founder & CEO, Latent Labs. A co-developer of AlphaFold 2, Simon subsequently established and co-led DeepMind’s protein design team. At Latent Labs, he is building frontier generative models that move beyond predicting biological structures to designing new molecules thereby making biology programmable and enabling new approaches to developing medicines.

Agenda

6:00–6:30 PM — Doors Open, Drinks & Networking
Meet fellow AI researchers and founders.

6:30–8:00 PM — Fireside Conversations
Two moderated discussions featuring Çağlar Gülçehre, Ed Hughes, Jeff Hawke and Simon Kohl, exploring world models, text diffusion, AI for scientific discovery, and the challenge of building frontier AI labs.

8:00–10:00 PM — Drinks, Canapés & Networking
Continue the conversation with the speakers and fellow researchers building at the frontier.

Who Should Join

This evening is for AI researchers, engineers and founders

In person. Invite-only. Places are limited, so please register early.

About Radical Ventures

Radical Ventures invests and partners with the AI visionaries who will define the future, investing from day-zero incubations and seed through growth and pre-IPO scaling.

Radical has offices in Toronto, San Francisco, London and New York. www.radical.vc

About Nebius

Nebius is the AI infrastructure platform backed by NVIDIA, purpose-built for teams training, fine-tuning, and deploying at scale.

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