Kitchener-Waterloo-based AI research startup Transformer Lab has launched what co-founder and CEO Ali Asaria said is “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever been a part of.”
For the past two years, Transformer Lab’s four-person team has been quietly working to fully automate the research process.
“We see this as the next revolution, the one that actually replaces what we currently call the AI revolution.”
Ali Asaria,
Transformer Lab
Today, Transformer Lab announced it has opened access to the fruit of that labour, Primus, an autonomous research tool Asaria claims can connect users with AI agents capable of producing “PhD-level” research in a small fraction of the time as their human counterparts.
A global shortage of machine learning (ML) engineers has constrained AI progress; Asaria hopes Primus can fix that, and more.
“If you work in a neolab, but you can’t hire the best [ML] engineers because there’s only so many of them in the world, and most of the best ones are going to these few companies, well, now you have access to as many of them as you want at the touch of a button,” Asaria told BetaKit in an interview.
Asaria teamed up with co-founder Tony Salomone, who worked at Asaria’s previous retail tech startups Tulip and Well.ca, to build Transformer Lab in 2024. The AI research lab officially launched earlier this year with funding from a group that includes Toronto’s Ripple Ventures and Kitchener-Waterloo’s Garage Capital.
Since forming, Transformer Lab has been spending time with researchers to understand their processes step-by-step and automate them.
Primus projects run dozens or hundreds of different agents, which each use different AI models appropriate to their respective tasks, Asaria said. Some are tiny, while others are frontier models from big-name providers. The company is also training models of its own.
Transformer Lab claims Primus can turn a single prompt-based research question from a hypothesis to a completed research paper in “hours to days” without additional human direction.
Using Primus, Transformer Lab claims that it has produced and published 30 “Masters to PhD-level” research papers in 30 consecutive days across domains ranging from materials science to physics, the interoperability of large language models, seismology, protein design, audio generation, and 3D vision. While Transformer Lab did not provide more detail on how these papers were assessed to be at that level, one of them has already received a citation in published research by the Google DeepMind team.
With Primus, Asaria hopes to play a part in ensuring more than just a few tech giants own the AI future, and accelerate the pace of research across all sorts of scientific domains—beyond just ML. “We see this as the next revolution, the one that actually replaces what we currently call the AI revolution,” he said.
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Transformer Lab has made Primus free to start, and is rolling it out to the public on a waitlisted basis, admitting researchers and developers as AI compute capacity permits.
“We’re a small team, and we have plenty of ideas that get shelved because we lack the resources to execute them,” Rubric Labs co-founder and CEO Sarim Malik said in a news release. “With Primus, it feels like adding a team of world-class, senior ML engineers to your roster overnight who can chip away at your ideas.”
Asaria is also conscious that tools like Primus could ruffle some feathers. Some academics have expressed doubt that AI can oversee the entire research pipeline; as Alessandra Buccella wrote for The Conversation, “the very existence of science as a source of authoritative knowledge about the natural world fundamentally depends on human life.”
Transformer Lab is trying to be thoughtful about how it deploys the product, including by specifying in its terms that users are not allowed to submit the papers it produces to journals and ask human volunteers to review them.
Asaria thinks a shift to more AI-powered research ultimately stands to benefit humanity, but “needs to be done carefully.”
Feature image courtesy Mauricio J Calero for BetaKit.