AI and openness at CERN: FirstPrinciples demos the AI Physicist at the Open Science Fair

FirstPrinciples presented an early demo of its AI Physicist at the Open Science Fair, held at CERN. The event sparked conversations on trust, openness, and the role of AI in research.

At CERN, FirstPrinciples presented an early demo of the AI Physicist at the Open Science Fair, a meeting ground for researchers, policymakers, and open-data advocates reshaping how science is done. This year's theme, "Fusing Forces – Accelerating Open Science through Collaboration," set the tone.

The new gatekeepers of knowledge in the age of AI

For FirstPrinciples' Lead Data Scientist Matthias Le Dall, the theme resonated with both urgency and history. "Historically, science has never been open. In antiquity, knowledge was held by the few select people who were educated enough to know how to read and write. Now AI introduces a new kind of gatekeeping: not knowledge itself, but one of large-scale and highly costly compute infrastructure." Building and training powerful AI systems now requires financial investment on a scale that rivals major experimental facilities.

The AI Physicist meets healthy skepticism

FirstPrinciples presented the AI Physicist as an experiment in openness: a system designed not for engagement or profit, but for physics itself. Healthy skepticism met the demo at first. But once the conversation turned to concrete methods — symbolic regression, equation testing at scale, transparent reasoning steps — skepticism shifted to curiosity. "We explained how you can, in principle, extract mathematical intuition from LLMs," says Nawar Ismail, who co-presented the demo. "Imagine asking a thousand models to propose a theory, then testing each against real data."

"Many people were talking about 'bad agents.' We wanted to show what a 'good agent' might look like: one built solely for studying physics." Not all feedback was enthusiastic and some attendees raised fears about AI replacing scientists. But the prevailing tone was constructive, and FirstPrinciples engaged in many passionate debates about quality control, attribution, and funding.

Building openness from the start

The Open Science Fair showed how much common ground exists among communities that don't often meet — AI researchers, open-data advocates, physicists, and policymakers. The challenge is to embed openness into the tools we're building today. For FirstPrinciples, the AI Physicist isn't just a physics engine. It's a test case for how domain-specialized AI can be developed transparently, in collaboration with the people it's meant to serve.

This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and thoroughly edited by FirstPrinciples staff and scientific advisors.