Mission
Our goal is
superintelligence.
We state it plainly because we mean it literally.
Primer exists to build intelligence that exceeds human capability across broad domains. Not by assembling ever-larger frozen models, but by creating systems whose intelligence continues to develop after training ends.
We believe continual development may be one of the mechanisms required to get there. Primer is our experimental platform for studying that path.
The research program
The Intelligence Bootloader.
Every computer needs a bootloader: the small program that starts everything else. We are searching for its equivalent in intelligence.
The smallest starting point from which a system can reliably keep acquiring genuinely new knowledge on its own.
Most AI development optimizes what a model knows when training ends. The bootloader program optimizes what a system can come to know afterward. We are not trying to load intelligence into a machine. We are trying to find the conditions under which intelligence starts loading itself.
The central hypothesis
Intelligence can be grown: a system can keep acquiring, retaining, and building on knowledge it was never trained on.
Falsifiable by design
What we optimize
Validated novel knowledge acquisition per unit of compute.
Not benchmark scores. Not parameter count.
The path
From first concept
to compounding intelligence.
- 01Learns
Acquires knowledge created after its training ended.
Demonstrated - 02Remembers
Keeps what it learns, even while it learns more.
Demonstrated - 03Combines
Uses what it knows to solve harder related problems.
Demonstrated - 04Compounds
Each thing it learns makes the next easier.
Demonstrated - 05Abstracts
Turns its own solutions into reusable tools.
In progress - 06Invents
Creates new ideas from old ones.
Ahead - 07Transfers
Carries a method from one field into another.
Ahead - 08Directs itself
Chooses what to learn next.
Ahead - 09Discovers
Produces verified knowledge nobody had before.
Ahead - 10Improves how it learns
Each generation learns faster than the last.
Mission
Where we are
What we are not claiming.
Primer has not demonstrated AGI or superintelligence, and is not generally smarter than frontier models.
What we have demonstrated, in internal evaluations, is narrower and, we believe, more important than it sounds: a small model that can acquire knowledge generated after its training ended, retain it, and build on it — including multi-step chains where earlier self-acquired knowledge makes later learning both possible and cheaper.
The distance between that and superintelligence is enormous. Our bet is that it is a distance of development, not just of scale, and that it can be crossed one measured, falsifiable step at a time.
The mission is superintelligence.
The research standard is evidence.
PRIMER
Building intelligence that compounds.