According to many true-believers, the biggest promise of AI is its potential to accelerate scientific discovery; once-in-a-generation breakthroughs could one day become routine, thanks to algorithms. By extracting patterns from troves of data far too vast for any human mind to fathom, so the thinking goes, AI scientists could eventually help solve some of humanity’s most dire technical problems: climate change, cancer, even—according to diehard transhumanists—death itself. But science is a crowdsourced enterprise, dependent upon a global community of researchers who can freely access and build off each other’s work. The AI industry, in contrast, is currently dominated by a handful of research labs whose proprietary code is closed off from one another, and from the wider world. A fast-rising startup called Mirendil is now hoping to bridge that gap between scientific discovery and frontier AI access. The company recently raised $200 in seed funding, bringing its total valuation to $1 billion. Funding was provided by VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, as well as by Nvidia. Based in downtown San Francisco, it currently has a technical staff of around twenty researchers. Its website features several job postings with starting salaries of up to $500,000.