FirstPrinciples Tech Stack

AI research nonprofit developing systems to discover fundamental physics

Non-profit Organizations Toronto 11–50 employees Founded 2024 Nonprofit

FirstPrinciples is a Toronto-based nonprofit (founded 2024) building an AI system to uncover the laws of nature through machine reasoning. The stack reveals a compute-heavy operation: HPC, InfiniBand, Slurm, Kubernetes orchestration alongside ChatGPT and Claude, indicating substantial infrastructure for large-scale model training. Hiring is decelerating (2 roles in last 30 days) despite active pain points around scaling training and attracting technical talent — typical for early-stage research orgs balancing deep talent needs with pre-revenue funding constraints.

Tech Stack 17 technologies

Core StackSalesforce Asana AWS Kubernetes Docker Ansible Linux ChatGPT Claude LaTeX HPC InfiniBand Slurm Salt Chef Unix CI/CD

What FirstPrinciples Is Building

◆Challenges

Securing multi-million dollar commitments
Access to government research funding
Closing transformational deals
Scaling hiring
Attracting highly technical talent
Balancing long-term talent strategy
Securing funding resources
Scaling large-scale model training
Integrating cloud and hpc environments
Scaling training to large models

▲Active Projects

Funding acquisition for ai physicist platform
Large-scale pre-training experiments
Ai physicist development
State-of-the-art methods and applications
Multi-year fundraising strategy
Metrics and accountability frameworks
Major donor cultivation
Data extraction projects
Llm-based extraction pipelines
Fundamental model research

Hiring Activity

Decelerating15 roles · 2 in 30d

Department

Engineering

Research

Fundraising

Data

Legal

Product

Seniority

Senior

Director

Manager

Mid

Staff

Notable leadership hires: Director of Development

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About FirstPrinciples

FirstPrinciples operates as a mission-driven nonprofit research organization focused on AI-assisted discovery of fundamental physics. The team (11–50 employees, Toronto-based) spans engineering, research, data, product, and fundraising functions, with a lean leadership structure. Core projects center on building and scaling their AI Physicist platform, running large-scale pre-training experiments, and executing a multi-year funding strategy. The organization runs its own compute infrastructure (HPC + cloud on AWS) rather than relying solely on commercial AI APIs, enabling long-horizon training and proprietary model development.

HeadquartersToronto

Company Size11–50 employees

Founded2024

Hiring MarketsUnited States

Frequently Asked Questions

What is FirstPrinciples working on?

FirstPrinciples is developing an AI Physicist system to discover fundamental laws of nature. Active projects include large-scale pre-training experiments, LLM-based data extraction pipelines, and state-of-the-art physics methods research.

What tech stack does FirstPrinciples use?

The organization uses ChatGPT and Claude for inference, paired with HPC infrastructure (Slurm, InfiniBand), Kubernetes for orchestration, and AWS for cloud compute. LaTeX, Salesforce, and Asana round out development and operations tooling.