Physicist, Theo Collaborators Program, Quantum Information

About this role

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.