Why AI Should Cure Cancer, Not Optimize Ads

While everyone chases incremental AI improvements, Joseph Kraus is asking the uncomfortable question: "Why is no one using AI to cure cancer?"

As CEO of Radical AI, Kraus isn't content with the low-hanging fruit that most AI companies pursue. Instead, he's tackling one of science's most entrenched problems: the 150-year-old materials discovery process that takes decades and costs fortunes. His company is building artificial general intelligence specifically for scientific discovery, starting with materials science—the foundation of everything from semiconductors to aerospace.

In this candid conversation, Kraus reveals why the hardest problems deserve our attention, how his military training shaped his approach to impossible missions, and why he believes AI can compress decades of scientific research into days. This isn't just another tech story—it's a blueprint for using AI where it matters most.

Joseph Kraus: My name is Joseph Kraus. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Radical AI. At Radical AI we are building artificial general intelligence for scientific discovery starting in material science.

The material discovery process is challenging today. Processes and materials just take an incredibly long time. Typically 10+ years, our AI agents will index millions of scientific publications and learn what a field has done already and so this process can happen at an incredible speed in comparison to a human scientist, about 370 times the speed we operate as a human scientist today.

Joseph Kraus: I just always was taught and really wanted to be like my dad in pursuing something that I knew I was the best in the world at and that I truly love to do. My father, he always instilled that not just about being happy about what you're doing, but much more engaged in what you're doing.

Find the thing that you can be better at anyone else in the world and where can I make an impact. That for me has always been this guiding light into what I wanna do and how I wanna do it.

Joseph Kraus: When I was an undergraduate I actually bumped into someone who was serving part time in the National Guard. I really wanted to go to a military academy in the United States. They're incredibly prestigious. You have the opportunity to serve the country, so I thought that this would be for me.

I enlisted in the military my junior year of college. Basic training is an amazing experience, because you're with a bunch of people you've never met in your life, meeting people from so many different walks of life. Everyone was there for the same mission. They were there for the same goal of building a stronger military to protect and defend the freedoms that America likes to propagate throughout the world.

That was not only inspirational but was the first time I was forced to remove myself from the equation and put the mission of the team, which was the battery that I was serving in, before yourself, and that was an incredibly insightful lesson.

Joseph Kraus: While I was serving in the National Guard, I was also a scientist at the Army Research Lab. It is this corporate research lab that the US Army has with a bunch of scientists working to try to push novel research up to higher technology readiness levels.

We used to have these commanders who would come through and tour the facility. We would have to tell them why the work we were doing was relevant to the army and their relevance was not the same relevance to us. They were thinking about future conflict, about how to bolster the force or make it stronger. We were thinking around electrons and hydrogen atoms and thinking about making new novel 2D materials for different technologies.

There was this disconnect between leadership at the army and the scientific perspective that we were driving. There was this day where I had to actually explain why what we were doing in the lab could eventually impact future of warfare or future technology that the army would wanna use and that's when I realized that that is exactly what I wanted to do.

I wanted to transition from this fundamental area of research and driving our understanding of science to actually commercialize science, science that could actually go into products and make a difference. That was where things started to come together, that the only way to really do this is to actually push technology in a novel way, in which case startups are the best place to do that today.

Joseph Kraus: I know one day I want to build a company, but I have no idea how to build it. So I said, let me find entrepreneurs and investors who have built a company in the past and now are investing in the companies of the future.

I looked up a bunch of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and really wanted to be in New York. I bumped into Kevin Ryan. Kevin Ryan is a prolific entrepreneur in New York City, he built and ran DoubleClick before taking that company public, and then he came out of that and started AlleyCorp, which is both an incubation studio as well as an early stage investment firm.

When I talked to Kevin, I had told him if you're not investing in materials, you're not gonna invest in the future. And he said that's a big bet. Why don't you come prove that out? So I took a leave of absence. I moved to New York a week later and I had a 6 month internship to see if this was the field for me.

Joseph Kraus: Kevin had taught me early part of my career that you have to have a biased action and just get things done. Strategy can be effective, but most of the time will also lead to a dead end with no action involved. The best entrepreneurs have an immense bias to action. They just get things done. And in doing so watch the results unfold in front of them as they do that and then they continue to go through their process.

Startups are already hard enough, and the way to make them easier is to do more than anyone in your space will do with more information than anyone in your space has with a thesis that no one else has been able to come up with. That is truly what can drive good value, and I think a biased action is the most important lesson I've learned from him.

Joseph Kraus: One of my other co-founders and I were both investors at AlleyCorp, and Jorge was looking into AI technology as every good investor was, but really at a fundamental level. He was reading the publications coming out on novel architectures and novel approaches to machine learning and what the impact of the technology was.

He came over to me one day and said, AI is so incredible. I am actually convinced this technology is gonna change the world. What I don't understand is why everyone is picking low hanging fruit and solving small problems. Why is no one using AI to cure cancer was the question he asked me.

I said, well, I don't know about curing cancer, but that's a really good opportunity. So we spent the next month and a half reading hundreds of research papers on all the different fields that we think AI could be put into and finally it dawned on me that material science, problems with fragmentation, slow moving ability, lack of progress over short timelines, this might be a great area for AI to be implemented in.

We took another deep dive and read every publication we could find at the intersection of material science, AI, and as we found out, robotics, and that led us to our third co-founder Herd Cedar, who had built an autonomous scientific lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Together with him us three really saw and came up with this vision for where science is gonna go, where AI and autonomy are gonna build a new paradigm of scientific discovery.

Joseph Kraus: The most important areas are the most challenging. I think those are the things people should work on. If you look at technology today we don't struggle with what we call optimization problems at radical AI driving 12 or 5% improvements in the current system we're actually quite good at that. What is incredibly challenging is novel discovery, and that's where most heart problems lie.

When us three wanted to form the company, we had this opinion that if you want to impact the most important industries in the world automotive and aerospace, manufacturing and defense, climate, energy, semiconductors, all of them are a direct result from materials R&D. But these processes and materials just take an incredibly long time, typically 10+ years, and an inexorable amount of cost to go from a novel discovery to a scale material system.

This was the exact place that we could make a massive impact. We think AI and autonomy are going to drive change in the process and in doing so can actually unlock and remove materials as our biggest barrier to some of our most important industries. If you are aligned on that mission, then the problems that you wanna solve are naturally going to be hard because if you succeed you will fundamentally reshape human trajectory and that is an incredibly impactful thing to be able to do.

Joseph Kraus: The reason AI is so impactful in this space is its ability to index information. The best example that we always like to give is AlphaGo. It was this AI that was built by the Google team and it played with the best player in the world, the game of Go, and the best part of the story is this infamous move it makes where everyone watching thinks the AI makes a mistake and in reality it has indexed so many games of Go it made a move the human brain has never thought of before.

When we take that to science, all of our limitations in science come from the human brain. How many papers can we read? How many things can we simulate. How many experiments can we run and then how do we tie all those together to make a new hypothesis on what we want to build.

But if you bring AI and autonomy to the center of that, you unlock this indexing problem that a human scientist feels. You can read millions of publications, simulate billions of materials, and test thousands of them, connecting all of this information in real time. If you can do that, the world that we think we can really build is one that is what we call inversely designed where we are no longer making materials and then looking for a solution to solve we are actually taking our hardest problems and inversely designing material from that.

Joseph Kraus: We are incredibly passionate about the culture that we built at the company. Every single person that we hire into radical AI, we ask the same question if you are looking for a job, this is not the place for you. You're incredibly intelligent you can go get employed other places if you are looking for a mission, then you should come work here.

Every person that comes to radical AI deeply, deeply believes in the mission that we are going after and the way that we keep that alignment is through culture. We are never afraid to fail. We actually know failure is a part of the discovery and learning process and so we will push aggressively relentlessly to drive technology to rethink from first principles and to build a connected system that can truly discover novel materials.

Joseph Kraus: We adopted a rule very early in the company I believe SpaceX started it called the 51% rule where when you are at 51% confidence on a decision, you just make that decision. The reason why is you will actually cause more time and less efficacy across the company by debating on decisions that you could otherwise quickly decide on and see what the result of that decision is going to be.

Two different things that we think about first, how big is the decision. And second, what are the risks if the decision is wrong, and those two together allow us to actually identify when we are at 51% or not. 51% is not about just making decisions fast for fast sake. 51% is making decisions that you are already going to make, just making them earlier and then dealing with the effect of not always being 100% correct.

Joseph Kraus: One of my favorite quotes in the world is, Steve Jobs is connecting the dots. You can never connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. This is an exact moment where I didn't know where this dot was going to lead, but now when I look back, it was imperative that I went through that experience and lived through the frustration of materials research today.

You need dots to be able to connect and while you might not know where this dot is gonna make an impact, you never know where it is going to or how it is going to impact what comes next. I didn't care that I didn't know what was coming next. I didn't care if it was going to work or not. I didn't care if I was gonna be a scientist or not.

What I cared about was continuing to push forward and searching for the answer and I think that's truly how I ended up getting to the answer so I just reminded myself every day that this will lead to something you have to never ever give up no matter the scenario.

Joseph Kraus: We want to remove materials as the blocker to those innovations and that's why we don't think there's an end to the company, we think this company will be 100, 200 years old. It will way outlive myself and the two co-founders. This is a company and a technology that when it succeeds will truly be able to create a world not today thought possible.