Singapore-headquartered artificial general intelligence research company Sapient Intelligence today announced the launch of PRAXIST (Beta), an autonomous AI research and development (R&D) system that takes on complex technical problems and independently tests and validates potential solutions. While AI has rapidly accelerated productivity in content generation, R&D remains difficult to automate as breakthroughs require testing multiple hypotheses and continuously determining which paths to pursue.
PRAXIST addresses this challenge as an R&D capacity multiplier that independently explores which technical approach can best achieve a measurable objective, rather than executing a predefined path.
The approach has demonstrated promising results in controlled internal evaluations. On 75 challenging Kaggle competitions from MLE-Bench, a benchmark designed to test how well AI systems tackle complex real-world machine learning problems, PRAXIST achieved the highest-level result in 49 competitions at an approximate recorded model cost of US$3,000, compared with 34 highest-level results for Claude Code at approximately US$38,000 under same evaluation conditions.
"Unlike general coding agents, which are built primarily to execute a specific task, PRAXIST is designed for long-horizon R&D, where the problem-solving approach itself may need to be discovered and adapted," says William Chen, Co-Founder at Sapient Intelligence. "A conventional research team is ultimately constrained by the number of experiments its researchers can realistically run and evaluate. PRAXIST is designed to provide organizations with the ability to augment their existing teams with additional research capacity, enabling them to explore problems with a breadth and speed that would otherwise require significantly greater specialist resources."
Partner engineering results further illustrate potential. In a partner-provided rocket-landing simulation, PRAXIST improved baseline to 100% within 12 hours. In an industrial robotic SLAM problem, a partner team achieved 9.37cm accumulated error after several months, while PRAXIST reduced error to 5.01cm within three days.
PRAXIST deploys multiple autonomous research peers to explore approaches in parallel, test hypotheses, investigate failures, and validate promising results. Unlike tree-like search used by other similar systems where each candidate inherits from one parent and weaker branches are pruned, PRAXIST uses a generation-layered research graph that preserves what every experiment teaches. This allows later generations to combine valuable mechanisms, evidence, and constraints across different lineages, including failed attempts.
For organizations with limited AI or machine learning capabilities, PRAXIST can provide an AI research layer alongside existing domain expertise; for sophisticated teams, it can augment capabilities and increase scale and breadth of R&D.
"AI has mastered executing what we know. The next frontier is discovering what we don't," said Jin Li, Chief Scientist of PRAXIST. "PRAXIST is our first step toward making autonomous discovery a practical capability for organizations tackling complex problems. As we continue to develop the platform, we will look to expand beyond traditional R&D. Our ambition is to give organizations a fundamentally greater capacity to explore what is possible, enabling existing teams to pursue more experiments, approaches, and innovations while keeping human expertise and judgment at the center."
Initial applications are focused on sectors with intensive R&D requirements including AI, engineering and robotics, manufacturing, finance, and health and drug discovery, with aim to extend beyond traditional R&D into broader business optimization.
About Sapient Intelligence
Founded and headquartered in Singapore, Sapient Intelligence is developing a new generation of AI systems that move beyond answering questions and executing predefined tasks to autonomously discover, reason, and optimize across complex problems without predefined solutions. By combining autonomous research systems with novel foundation-model architectures, Sapient Intelligence advances autonomous discovery through deeper reasoning, self-evolving capabilities, greater adaptability, and enhanced interpretability.
