The speaker says Rohan, a Periodic researcher, lacked a prior background in materials science and biology but had experience training models and working at OpenAI.

“A friend, shout out to Rohan, who works there, is a researcher that doesn't have a background in any of this, right? He's done model training, was at OpenAI.”

“Um, material sciences, bio, all this is new, but within, you know, the company's only been around for so long, they're able to put out state-of-the-art models.”