Physicist, Theo Collaborators Program, Quantum Information

Overview

FirstPrinciples is an independent, non-profit research organization building Theo, the AI Physicist - an autonomous scientific system designed to reason about fundamental physics from first principles. Our long-term vision is to accelerate deep scientific discovery by combining machine reasoning with human scientific judgment.

As part of this effort, we are launching the Theo Collaborators Program: a small, selective group of expert physicists who will work with us to validate, guide, and stress-test the scientific reasoning produced by the AI Physicist in a focused research domain. This is not a tool evaluation program, and it is not a traditional advisory role. Collaborators engage with a concrete scientific direction, help assess whether the system’s reasoning is sound, and contribute to shaping what “good AI-generated physics” should look like.

The Theo Collaborators Program is open to late-stage PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, early-career faculty, and industry researchers with strong theoretical backgrounds.

We operate as a global nonprofit organization, with a Canadian foundation, a US-based 501(c)(3).

Current Scientific Focus (2026)

For the initial phase, we are focused on Quantum Information Theory, with emphasis on narrow, formalizable sub-fields where rigorous reasoning and constraint-based results are possible.

Representative areas include:

• Structural constraints in quantum LDPC codes
• Trade-offs between locality, rate, and distance in stabilizer codes
• No-go or impossibility results under fault-tolerance assumptions
• Information-theoretic bounds relevant to quantum error correction
• Fundamental limitations of decoding or logical operations

The goal is depth over breadth: producing AI-assisted theoretical results that are technically coherent, non-trivial, and respectable to the physics community.

What Theo Collaborators Do

Theo Collaborators engage at critical points in the research cycle:

Question Validation & Framing

• Review candidate research questions generated by the AI Physicist’s Question Formulator (QF)
• Help identify which questions are: scientifically meaningful; tractable; already resolved in the literature; or ill-posed.
• Provide feedback on assumptions, scope, and framing and help improve the Question Formulator module.

Shaping Question Ranking & Evaluation Criteria

• Help us refine how questions are ranked by: novelty; complexity; originality; tractability; and scientific relevance
• Contribute to defining what “interesting” and “non-trivial” should mean for the future autonomous scientific system.

This input directly informs how the AI Physicist prioritizes which questions to pursue deeply.

Scientific Validation of Research Outputs

• Review AI-generated research outputs (Dynamic Research Objects, or DROs) and assess whether they are: internally consistent; mathematically sound; properly grounded in the relevant literature; and aligned with accepted physical principles and assumptions
• Identify errors, gaps, or unclear reasoning, including points where assumptions are too strong, steps are missing, or conclusions are not adequately supported.
• In addition, help us identify where the AI Physicist’s scientific workflow falls short