Physical Superintelligence

The Singularity needs a physics department. The last century’s golden age of physics gave us transistors (1947), nuclear energy (1951), and lasers (1960). Whether that era slowed due to complexity, funding, politics, fashion, or other reasons, artificial superintelligence is poised to reignite it. I recently helped found a company to do exactly that.

Physical Superintelligence PBC (PSI) is building what it believes is the world’s first vertically integrated factory for physical superintelligence: an AI system that reasons like a theorist, validates like a computational physicist, tests like an experimentalist, discovers what none of them could alone, and drives breakthroughs through to commercial realization and deployment. The company is organized around a single mission: new physics, at scale.

This is in keeping with the thesis set forth in an essay I co-authored with Peter Diamandis, Solve Everything. The essay maps a solution wavefront that begins with math and code, then cascades through physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and finally planetary-scale systems like energy and climate. The key insight is that the domains are not independent. Physics is the foundation. Countless discoveries and innovations across every physical science are bottlenecked on breakthroughs in physics, both fundamental and applied, that no single human mind can reach alone. Every domino downstream is waiting on the first one to fall.

PSI aspires to be the company that pushes that first domino over.

The Solve Everything framework calls this the shaped-charge model: focus the full force of superintelligence through a single, hard, positive-sum target, and the spillover industrializes the entire domain. PSI is a shaped charge aimed at physics.

The PSI team comes from Google, OpenAI, Meta, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, and the Perimeter Institute: a team of nearly 20 physicists, engineers, and AI researchers, expanding in Boston and San Francisco, united by a conviction that the biggest lever for human flourishing is accelerating physics, from fundamental theory to real-world applications.

PSI is a Public Benefit Corporation, in part because the breakthroughs ahead may change both what we understand reality to be and what we can build with that understanding. That kind of power demands a governance structure oriented toward broad public benefit from day one.

PSI is backed by SV Angel, Valkyrie, Balaji Srinivasan, Solari Capital, 021T Capital, and leaders from OpenAI, SoftBank, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Google DeepMind, and World.

PSI is selectively partnering with organizations whose hardest problems demand a fundamentally new approach. Interested organizations can learn more at PSI.inc.

Ignis scientiae, illumina mundum. Fire of knowledge, illuminate the world.

(Disclosure: I sit on the PSI board and have a financial interest in the company.)