Startup PSI Claims AI Solves Five Open Quantum Information Problems

The last MIT triple-major genius has made his move.

By Cheng Qian, reporting from "Ao Fei Si"

QbitAI | Official Account: QbitAI

It’s terrifying—how much time has passed?

AI just broke mathematics, and now it’s starting to break physics...

Just moments ago, five open problems in quantum information were announced as solved with AI assistance.

The company behind this breakthrough is a mysterious startup called Physical Superintelligence (PSI).

They claim that using their proprietary AI research system, they achieved results on five open problems in quantum information theory. The papers, Lean formal proofs, and verification code have all been published on GitHub for peer review.

Who exactly is PSI, a company established less than two months ago?

What Did PSI Solve?

PSI’s current focus is quantum information science, which primarily studies how to leverage the unique laws of quantum mechanics to store, process, and transmit information. This aims to surpass the computational limits of traditional computers and explore more secure communication methods.

The five challenges tackled by AI come from the Open Quantum Problems (OQP) catalog, which has a 27-year history.

This catalog was established in 1999 by German physicist Reinhard Werner specifically to collect significant research questions that have long stumped the quantum information community.

These five problems span five core directions: entanglement distillation, quantum field theory, high-dimensional quantum communication, quantum channel capacity, and quantum causality. They include:

• OQP 2 | Non-distillability of states with negative partial transpose
• OQP 12 | Vacuum entanglement and Bell inequalities
• OQP 27 | Optimal measurements for CGLMP Bell inequalities
• OQP 38 | PPT squared conjecture and entanglement breaking
• OQP 43 | Purifiability of quantum causal processes

We won’t delve into the specific proof processes here. It suffices to note that three of the five problems where PSI made progress (OQP 2, OQP 12, and OQP 27) were included in the catalog at the beginning of this century. This speaks volumes about the difficulty of these tasks.

“The World’s Most Advanced Physics Research Lab”

Visiting PSI’s website reveals something best described as empty. Tackling these quantum information problems marks their first major achievement.

After all, the company only officially launched on September 1st of this year.

But when they do speak, they make waves. Upon their debut, they boldly declared their ambition to build “the world’s most advanced physics research laboratory.”

PSI’s founding team is intriguing, but its founder and Chief Scientist, Alex Wissner-Gross, is particularly noteworthy.

Wissner-Gross completed three undergraduate majors simultaneously at MIT: Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics, graduating as the top student in his engineering class...

What does it mean to complete these three majors at once? To put it in perspective, MIT subsequently discontinued the option of pursuing three simultaneous majors because “too few people could pull it off, making the option largely meaningless.”

Consequently, Wissner-Gross can legitimately claim the title of “MIT’s last undergraduate graduate with a triple major.”

Perhaps after testing the waters, he realized his true passion lay in physics. In 2007, he earned his PhD in Physics from Harvard.

It must be said that his understanding of “AI + Physics” was far ahead of its time.

As early as 2013, when deep learning was still in its infancy, he took the TEDx stage to explain intelligent behavior using the physical concept of “causal entropic forces.”

He proposed a bold idea:

Intelligence can be understood as a tendency to increase future action possibilities.

This might be hard to grasp, so let me give an example.

For instance, why do you try so hard to maintain balance and avoid falling while riding a crowded subway?

From his theoretical perspective, it’s because if you fall, your available actions decrease. Staying upright means you retain the ability to move forward, backward, left, or right in the future.

Thus, as long as a system follows the rule of “maximizing future possibilities,” it may spontaneously exhibit intelligent behaviors such as tool use and cooperation.

While this sounds plausible, the idea remains unproven.

Despite being such a genius, Wissner-Gross finally couldn’t contain himself this year, proposing to “Solve Everything.”

In two articles published earlier this February, he outlined the vision for what is now PSI.

Some insights resonate strongly with the present moment: “The Singularity needs a Department of Physics.”

“The era of proof has arrived.”

Beyond Wissner-Gross, PSI’s co-founder and President, Alex Klokus, is also interesting. He is the founder of Futurism, a well-known US tech media outlet.

The funding background offers a glimpse into their strength. Upon their September launch, PSI announced they had completed a $58 million seed round.

The lead investor was Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Bill Gates.

This fund is backed by tech and business titans including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, specializing in investing in frontier technologies with the potential to drive energy transition.

The follow-on investors included SV Angel, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Its founder, Ron Conway, is a famous angel investor who early on bet on tech companies like Google, PayPal, and Twitter.

Furthermore, Balaji Srinivasan, former partner at a16z, participated in the investment. The round also attracted individual investors from tech giants such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, and Oracle.

Scaling Scientific Discovery

Having covered so much ground, PSI’s vision can be summarized in one phrase: moving scientific discovery “from genius to scale.”

For centuries, leaps in fundamental human science have relied almost entirely on the flashes of insight from individual geniuses like Newton and Einstein.

However, PSI believes this purely artisanal approach to research has hit a ceiling. Otherwise, why are we in the 21st century still building upon the foundations of 20th-century physics?

Scientific discovery should no longer be constrained by human time.

PSI calls its basic research unit an “Autonomous Campaign,” aiming to keep research running continuously from problem definition, hypothesis generation, and verification to experimentation and engineering deployment.

PSI also argues that in the AI era, while ideas are no longer scarce, truth remains scarce.

Large models can rapidly generate hundreds of hypotheses, but these are far from becoming truths.

To address this challenge, PSI introduced its proprietary AI scientific research system, Emmy (named in honor of Emmy Noether, the great mathematician and foundational figure in theoretical physics of the 20th century), which separates the "generation" and "verification" steps.

Its workflow operates roughly as follows:

First, when faced with a grand open problem in physics, Emmy calls upon state-of-the-art large models to decompose it into countless tiny, verifiable mathematical sub-hypotheses.

Next, these hypotheses are directly fed into the Lean formal proof assistant, symbolic computation engines, and high-precision verification code for rigorous screening. In this process, erroneous hypotheses are eliminated on the spot, while paths that pass local verification are retained and continue to evolve.

As long as the final Lean code compiles successfully, it means the physical theorem is 100% logically impeccable.

The verification results from this process can also serve as reward signals for training the next generation of AI physicists, driving continuous system improvement and enabling the scaling of scientific discovery.

One More Thing

This sounds promising, but here comes the question: How does a company researching physical theories generate revenue?

I looked into their current projects, and they remain quite pragmatic.

They plan to start making money by addressing the most realistic problems first.

Which ones? AI data centers.

Current supercomputing clusters are essentially extremely complex macroscopic physical systems, where power supply, cooling, networking, and compute resources involve highly coupled engineering optimization challenges.

This aligns perfectly with their expertise. The Emmy system can start from fundamental physical laws, treating power supply, heat dissipation, communication, and computing power as a single holistic equation to solve, thereby finding higher energy efficiency ratios based on physical limits.

Even more interestingly, beyond commercial applications, PSI has taken on a side project from a private investor (who might be a sci-fi enthusiast).

The Fermi Explorer interstellar mission.

PSI announced: We are starting to build the spaceship now!

According to the official announcement, they plan to launch the deep-space interstellar probe "Fermi Explorer" before 2029.

Utilizing the optimal lightweight engineering solutions optimized by the Emmy system within existing physical limits, this spacecraft will leave the Solar System, taking 80,000 years to fly toward Alpha Centauri—home to the Trisolarans from The Three-Body Problem and the Na'vi from Avatar, located 4.2 light-years away.

Although perhaps no human will live to see that day, we wish them success.

References: [1] https://psi.inc/ [2] https://github.com/physical-superintelligence/oqp-batch-2026

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