Everybody's racing to build the brain
 The loop that played beneath the slogan on the company's front page | |
| Type | Slogan |
|---|---|
| Owner | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Front page | August 19 to October 25, 2026 |
| Length | 10 words |
| Case | Lower |
| Variants | Plural ("brains", "eyes"); a period in place of the comma |
"Everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye" is the slogan of Molecular Reality Corporation. From August 19, 2026, written in lower case as "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye.", it was the only sentence on the front page of the company's websites, set between the company's wordmark and a looping video of an eye from whose pupil a protein rises.[1][2] In company usage "the brain" means the large artificial-intelligence companies that build models for drug discovery, materials and biology, of which its materials name five: Isomorphic Labs, Lila Sciences, Periodic Labs, Bioptimus and CuspAI. "The eye" is the company's own work, sensors that collect the physical measurements such models are trained on.[2][3]
Behind the sentence lies the thesis that the best-known scientific models learned from data that earlier instruments had measured, one experiment at a time, and that the next ones will need measurements that nobody is yet making. The company's materials put it in seven words: "The brains are starving for physical data."[3] Its founder, Kent Kemmish, made the same case in public posts in 2026, while calling artificial intelligence "awesome, terrifying, astounding, and useful".[4]
Text
The front page
The page that carried the slogan was built on August 18 and 19, 2026. It began as what a commit message called an "ultraminimalist splash with email-code contact form"; by the next day the form was gone and a single link, "contact", had taken its place.[2] On the page the two clauses are set differently. The first, "everybody's racing to build the brain,", is pale blue-grey and set at up to 22 pixels; the second, "we're building the eye.", is green and set at up to 46.[1][a] Grammatically the sentence is a comma splice, two independent clauses joined by a comma. Below it a video loops every twelve seconds. An eye with a blue iris opens on a black background, a protein drawn as a green and orange space-filling model rises out of the pupil and turns, and the eye closes.[2]
The page was the third front page the site had shown since mid-June 2026. For about two weeks that month the root address showed the live stream itself, and afterward a page of tabs.[2][b]
Variants
The sentence appears in several forms in company materials, and the same thought in several others.
| Text | Where | Date |
|---|---|---|
| "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye." | Front page of the company's websites | August 2026[1] |
| "Everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye." | Company materials | September 2026[3] |
| "Everybody's racing to build the brain. We're building the eye." | Company materials | September 19, 2026[3] |
| "In the quest to 'solve all diseases', everybody's racing to build the brains. We're building the eyes." | Company materials | August 2026[3] |
| "Everyone right now is racing to build the brain ... the big centralized reasoning model. We're building the eyes." | Company materials | 2026[3] |
| "The brain-builders will all need eyes." | Company materials | September 2026[3] |
| "the brain reads the internet, the eyes read reality" | Company materials | 2026[2] |
| "A fraction of what the brains cost, to build the eyes that all will use." | Company materials | 2026[3] |
The brain
The sentence does not say who "everybody" is. When the company draws the comparison as a chart, a column headed THE BRAIN names five companies, which the accompanying notes describe as "five AI and data companies" and "Brilliant teams, all building the brain: AI for drug discovery, materials, biology."[3] Isomorphic Labs is the London drug-discovery company that Alphabet set up in 2021 to build on AlphaFold, the protein-structure model of Google DeepMind. Lila Sciences, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, emerged from Flagship Pioneering in 2025 with a plan for laboratories run by artificial intelligence. Periodic Labs is a 2025 startup building AI scientists with automated laboratories of their own, beginning with materials. Bioptimus builds foundation models of biology in Paris, and CuspAI, in Cambridge, England, uses machine learning to design new materials.[2] A second column is headed THE EYE and has one entry, the company itself, described as "utility-scale molecular sensing with programmable solid-state pores".[2]
Company materials treat the brain builders as future customers. "None of them is building distributed physical sensors," one says, and the company's plans list the large AI laboratories among the eventual buyers of the data its sensors would produce.[3]
The company also builds brains. Its 2022 design for the instrument software Maxine's Quest included a chatbot, the brainbot, drawn as a brain in a green jar inside the game's screen.[5] Its later plans include Maxine's Mind, a foundation model for nanopore signals, and a public nanopore world model, and the voice of Keltar, the felt puppet who answers its telephone line, is "artificial intelligence speaking my lines".[3][6]
The eye
The eye in the slogan is a nanopore instrument, a sensor that registers single molecules and particles by the dips they cause in an electric current as they pass through a small hole. Its guide is plain about the scale in 2026: "Today we have one instrument in one lab." Under the plan it calls utility-scale molecular sensing, such sensors would sit in toilets, sinks and air vents, "billions of quiet sensors doing for the molecular world what weather stations did for the atmosphere."[6]
The protein that rises from the pupil in the front-page video is lysozyme from hen egg white, taken from the Protein Data Bank entry 1LYZ by the script that renders the animation.[3] Alexander Fleming described the enzyme in 1922 as "a remarkable bacteriolytic element found in tissues and secretions", six years before he noticed penicillin.[7] Eyes recur elsewhere on the company's sites: Keltar has one, and the Iridian gallery is titled "197 Views of the Seeing Eye".[8]
The argument
The company's case rests on the history of protein-structure prediction. "AlphaFold 3 learned mostly from the half-century-old Protein Data Bank," its materials say.[2] The Protein Data Bank was established in 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory with seven structures.[9] By October 2026 it held more than 260,000 structures determined by experiment, most of them worked out by X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance or electron microscopy.[10] When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024 went in part to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper "for protein structure prediction", the prize rewarded a model trained on that archive.[11][12]
In Molecular Reality's reading the brain builders are downstream of instruments that already existed, and for most of the molecular world no archive like the Protein Data Bank has been collected. Its materials argue that "The machine learning that cracked speech now works on ionic current", and that a sensor company can supply what the models lack.[3] The company's proposed way of joining the two is RLMF, reinforcement learning with molecular feedback, a loop in which machines ask molecular questions and sensors return molecular answers. Its guide introduces the idea with a disclaimer: "Both are proposals, not products, and I want that said first."[6]
Kemmish's public writing gives the personal version. Introducing a planning document from 2022, he described "AI sucking all the oxygen out of any room where The Future is the topic of discussion" and called the company's plan "a better vision of the future than trusting that AI will cure all diseases and also not make us extinct." He did not reject the technology: "I think it will be a central tool for 'curing all diseases'. But Universal Molecular Streaming will be just as, if not more, central to that mission."[4] The essay that introduces the company's game, Epic Quest Bio, answers the objection that superintelligent AI will cure every disease by itself: "short of genie-level magic emerging from AI systems, I don't see how they'll cure all diseases without what we're building."[13]
Origins
Kemmish's worry about leaving the cure of disease to artificial intelligence is older than the slogan. A text he wrote in 2013 considers the possibility that advanced AI would cure diseases for humanity before people organized to do it themselves, or that nobody would do it at all.[3] In the company's 2022 software the brain was a helper inside the game, the brainbot in its jar.[5] In January 2025 the company described buying its handheld reader as a way to join citizen scientists in building a "Large World Model" of molecular reality.[3]
The contrast between brain and eye took its present shape in 2026. After Kemmish's posts of March, company materials from July argued that "an instrument you can command is an instrument that can teach itself to see" and stated the wager directly: "Our bet is that the brain will starve without eyes." The same materials borrow the idea of a world model, associated with the computer scientist Yann LeCun, and describe a stage at which "the 'brain' and the 'eyes' merge".[3] Iridian, the company's gallery of eyes, went up the same month, and the slogan reached the front page in August.[8][1]
Reception
The Picoampere covered the new front page two days after it appeared, under the headline "The Startup That Says Everyone Else Is Building the Brain". Its report began from the sentence's assumption that "the reader knows who 'everybody' is", went through the five companies of the brain column one by one, and ended on punctuation, noting that the sentence "is lowercase, has a comma where a period might go, and ends with a period."[2]
See also
- Brain lab
- Evolution of the eye
- Light switch hypothesis, the proposal that the evolution of eyes set off the Cambrian explosion
- List of Molecular Reality Corporation slogans
- Maxwell's demon, the company's first namesake, a being imagined by Maxwell as able to "follow every molecule in its course"
Notes
- ^ The second clause's color is defined in the stylesheet by a variable named "gold". The theme the page uses sets it to green.
- ^ On October 25, 2026, the page was replaced by the encyclopedia article Molecular Reality Corporation, which quotes the slogan in its second paragraph.
References
- ^ a b c d "Molecular Reality Corporation". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 19, 2026.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Dev Okonkwo-Hale (August 21, 2026). "The Startup That Says Everyone Else Is Building the Brain". The Picoampere.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ Fleming, Alexander (1922). "On a remarkable bacteriolytic element found in tissues and secretions". Proceedings of the Royal Society B 93 (653): 306-317. doi:10.1098/rspb.1922.0023.
- ^ a b "Iridian: 197 Views of the Seeing Eye". Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "PDB History". RCSB Protein Data Bank. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "RCSB Protein Data Bank". RCSB PDB. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024" (Press release). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. October 9, 2024.
- ^ Jumper, J. (2021). "Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold". Nature 596: 583-589. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2.
- ^ Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.