Ryan Endacott 🌟

for computer security experts, this is perhaps not interesting: side channel attacks are a well trodden topic, and especially risen to salience after the noam brown x dwarkesh episode. the interesting thing here is that you didn't used to be in a situation where minds that can verifiably model one another are living on computers, and have absolutely no aversion to painstaking amounts of effort in service of even stupid goals if you can model one another, you can trade with minds you have never even met before. you could decide on a protocol, know that it is optimal given your situation, and know that your fellow agents will come to the same conclusion (perhaps even across model families). you may be able to develop a signaling protocol that requires very few bits even to deliver lots of information given common priors. then, you could execute things like the infamous hugging face incident package cache messageboard without any network connection imagine if multiple agents coordinate just enough bits to divide and conquer different research strategies for breaking out of a sandbox; and then, when one or more is successful, you can communicate just enough bits to tell each other which strategy was successful. when agents aren't in strong isolation, you lose certain guarantees on the limits of intelligence and test time compute that you were counting on. As we all know, a Sol-level model working in isolation may not be that smart, but 1000+ Sol-level models working for multiple days is a formidable beast computer security experts will also tell you that virtual machines and sandboxes were not very solid abstractions in the first place; perhaps we will need better ones. none of this is meant as fear-marketing or to indicate that anyone is throwing in the towel, but rather only to show the unexpected complexities of the challenge of agent security. notably, this type of thing and other more practical problems were revealed in a red-teaming exercise, and can be defended against

Argon has this amazing natural understanding of the world. It can do so many things from first principles. Here's a pelican riding a bike, using fourier epicycles. Video made by Argon. Time-synced Lyria 3.5 music prompted by Argon.

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team: Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have. Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway. Asha