Multiverse School Newsletter - 8/19
🛸 8/18/2024 Multiverse School Weekly Newsletter 🛸
Hey Multiverse Crew,
Hello! Did you see the last two agentic rover livestreams? @UnapologeticallyNerd, @thatdetroitandy and I built an agentic rover that can navigate a room. They're up on youtube. I also released a few videos on Self-Assembling Swarms and Swarm Dynamics. Don't forget to enlist to help stop the robot uprising.
Took a break from the newsletter last week, was a bit overloaded starting things up. We kicked off two recent projects, Mindcraft after the Emergent Garden guy's work, and Rover AI, after Joaquin and Andy's work. This is partly because these are some practical, non-chatbot examples of agentic behavior that can be demonstrated for our Agents classes. The theme of this week's Research Swarms are Orient.
Y'all know I am a policy wonk about some things.
The FTC is on fire lately, throwin out hits left and right. The FTC is also about to require that automatic, one-click subscription cancellation be a part of subscriptions and as a result Stripe launched a subscription cancellation API! I am literally genuinely so excited! This is a big deal for consumers. I implemented Stripe everywhere before I was aware of how hard it was to cancel recurring subscriptions, and I felt so weird about it because the manual process of this sucks for everyone. I hate having to email about subscription cancellation, I know you also hate it.
I will implement it sometime over the next two weeks. Look at that, the government doing things, for non-corporations! Big ups to the FTC. We're about to hit a size where COPPA and GDPR apply (once we hit 1000 signups) so I'll also slot in some time to add more of the infrastructure and documentation for you to learn about all the many ways in which I track everything about what you do when you interact with my systems. I'll also do a video series about it, showing the public what I can and can't get. I will not leak your IP address in the process, as the goal is literally digital privacy and consumer privacy education activism.
This Week's Classes
- Job Search is off
- Junior Devs is off
- Senior Devs is off
- CyberSecurity is off
This Week's Classes
Monday, August 19
I'm teaching a corporate class so I'll be out today, let's do evening research
7:30 Multiverse Research Swarm
Mindcraft Agent Research - let's try to get vision embedded into the Mindcraft agent, it's proving to be somewhat difficult. The theme of the week is Orient.
Tuesday, August 20
I'm teaching a corporate class so I'll be out today, but teaching in the evening
05:00 PM Advanced Agent and Tool Engineering
Self-Improving Agents
Focuses on creating self-improving agents, using critical theory, and applying expert strategies for prompt optimization. We'll create a self-improvement loop, talk about Language-Action Models
Sign Up
7:30 Multiverse Research Swarm
Let's see what we can do with OpenVSLAM - the theme of the week is Orient
Wednesday, August 21
I'm teaching a corporate class so I'll be out today
6:00 PM Storytelling, Narrative Alignment, and Agent Architecture
We might try a fork of the Mindcraft thing during this, with the Temperature for Personality thing.
Thursday, August 22
2:00 PM Complex Adaptive Systems & Game Theory Recording
We actually got some folks who have the reading to discuss, so we'll record if you're down.
The reading for this month is: Complex Adaptive Systems: Part 3: Computational Modeling, Chapter 6: Agent Based Objects
Part 4: Models of Complex Adaptive Social Systems: Chapter 7: A Basic Framework, Chapter 8: Complex Adaptive Social Systems in One Dimension
05:00 PM Advanced Agent and Tool Engineering
Swarms and Swarm Architecture
Teaches about creating swarms of agents for collaboration on complex goals and constructing effective agent architectures.
Sign Up
7:30 PM - Multiverse Research Swarm
We'll probably be on the server doing some Minecraft research for the Mindcraft agents after Advanced Agent and Tool Engineering
Friday, August 23
2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 Eastern - RoverAI
We'll be on TikTok Live, Youtube, and Twitch streaming the RoverAI build, solving problems and discussing how to build a rover.
Upcoming Tracks and Classes
Prompt Engineering - Spring
Swarm Architecture
A very very step-by-step deep dive into Autogen, the use of Self-architecting swarms, and we'll create a self-equipping, dynamically routed swarm recruiter that can be used in an agentic way in either the MindCraft or Rover AI project, or your own project.
(the class page mentions langchain but we took out all the langchain)
Prompt Engineering - Summer
Intro to Agents
Explore the basics of agents in this follow-up to Prompt Engineering and the Toolchain classes. You'll want to feel ok with troubleshooting Python before you dive in.
Prompt Engineering - Fall
M & W 11AM Pacific, 7:00PM London
Using Large Language Models starts Monday, September 02 11:00 AM
This class is the beginning of a 9-month sequence (you can take all or part or overlap with other cohorts to go fast). This class is scheduled to be something people in Europe could attend.
Prompt Engineering - Fall
T & TH 5PM Pacific
Using Large Language Models starts Tuesday, October 08 05:00 PM
This class is the beginning of a 9-month sequence (you can take all or part or overlap with other cohorts to go fast).
Custom GPTs
Important Links
Cool Videos
AI Tutorials and News
- Ilya Suskever says we have AGI
- Drama at OpenAI as more cofounders leave yall they are literally probably just exhausted
- Language Models are getting faster
- Attention is All You Need
- David Shapiro has turned, is against AI Safety
- Don't be seduced by progress
- A Systematic Approach to Robot Rebellion
- There are a billion humanoid robots on the way so there is probably nothing to worry about re: AI safety
- Yes, AGI is somewhat about Structured Outputs, If You've Taken My Classes You Know Why
- Langgraph is cool
- Multi-Agent Imitation Learning
- AiDer is something I actually use
- I guess Learn Rust
- Agents
- Boston Dynamics Robot Tries To Fit In With Coworkers
- MOE Scaling
- AI is doing Physics now
- Table Tennis Robot
- AI has Left Bias oh no not that
- Watch This Codebullet Video about PPO
- Autobuild
Biznaz
Programming
Psychology
Cyberpunk Dystopia
- Segregation
- [The possibility of Artificial Cognition](https://youtu.be/r3jTe6AGb_E?si=pGP4tkg5pF35iFVY
- How People Become Monsters
Culture
See you in the future~
Liz Howard