The Multiverse School

Multiverse School Newsletter - 8/4

🛸 8/4/2024 Multiverse School Weekly Newsletter 🛸

Hey Multiverse Crew,

Everything is changing! Again! It's almost the end of Hot Singularity Summer, and it's time to re-architect the schedule to suit our current student body. We're about to redo the main floor of Gather Town, likely this week.

Listen I know that you feel like everyone is aware of AI but they really aren't. You really are still ahead of the curve. We now have a Student Agreement spelled out very simply and clearly. Here's the Code of Conduct, outside of the curriculum so y'all have it.

This week we'll be working on Research Projects and recording the episode of Complex Systems Dynamics about agent-based simulations. Minecraft is an ideal playground for people building agents using a framework most of us know well. Those of us that attended Intro to Agents- you're invited to hang out with us as we try to get to an emergent agent simulation. Hop on if you see us in the Mindcraft room for supplemental hands-on labs.

I'll probably do some Mindcraft streams of what we have done so far and figure out how to get my bot hooked up to twitch chat so people can collaborate with the bots. Also, we're going to live community chat with Andy Didirosi on August 9th, at 2pm Pacific, 5 Eastern, and brainstorm some cool stuff to do with the rover. Maybe... we should let the bots out of Minecraft? Let me know what you think, on the stream! We're putting as many minds together as we can to come up with something cool. Bring your brain 🧠 and help ideate 🤔💭.

There's a new student profile where you can change all the details about yourself, and this should help us create a student directory. You can also opt-in to student directory listing.

Are you interested in mentoring? Add your meeting link to the profile page, and mention what you can mentor in. Read the [[Mentorship Rules and Guidelines]] or the [[Being Mentored Rules and Guidelines]] to participate, make sure you're active in either the Traveler Program, a class, or in the monthly membership. Listen- Mentorship Is Complicated. We're doing Non-Hierarchy here. The Rules Are Different In Order To Permit Non-Hierarchy To Persist. Rather than having an explicit assignment, the goal of the above protocol is to permit you complete autonomy and protect you when there may be a power differential, and help you to set reasonable boundaries yourself when you may have been conditioned not to.

I plan to implement a directory that is internal to the multiverse school and one that is public, you can indicate whether you desire either to be available.

Are you in I/O Psychology or Psychometrics? Please attend my class for free.

As of the next Session, we'll start doing Demo Days at the end of each week on Thursdays at 10am Pacific. Bring your progress to show everyone!

We're Rearchitecting The Calendar Next Session

We've become a majority senior developer community as of late, and are engaged in much more research! Also a lot of you are on the east coast. We're refactoring the calendar to make stuff attainable for you, and doing more streamed agentic emergence research in the later evenings that are more casual to participate in.

We're adjusting the schedule as of mid-August to help you have a more sane schedule, and scheduling more community-wide stuff in the later evenings that allows for more casual participation. Look for major changes coming up after the next break week is over.

We're also adding a morning Prompt Engineering cohort that Europe can attend.

Job Search Standup will probably change from a morning class to a different schedule. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to send emails, ya know.

We're Offering More Community Classes

We're working on a formal version of: - Learn To Code with Python - A longer-form DSPy class - Machine Learning & Statistics

Look for the announcement of their dates this month, likely to start in September.

We're Launching Corporate Classes

They pay the bills so we can offer some low-cost and free classes to underrepresented folks. Want me to come teach your company AI? Email us.)

This Week's Schedule

Job Search Standup

Is on hiatus for the next 3 weeks to be rearchitected and create different infrastructure around it. Tell Us If You Got A Job!

Monday, August 05

11:00 AM Robotics Framework deep dive

Let's get into the robot and get familiar with what we have control over and capabilities for and then make a plan for the build. All researchers strongly encouraged to attend. Anyone who has taken an agents class or who is in one should consider attending.

02:00 PM Prompt Engineering

Swarm Architecture
More Process Architecture for Swarms of agents to produce final outputs. Discussion of your projects, sharing of flows. Sign Up

Tuesday, August 06

11:00 AM Agency Planning & Ideating

Let's swarm to create an OODA loop for the bot and potentially create a fork of Andy's code that implements a probably-working implementation. Anyone who has taken an agents class or who is in one should consider attending.

2:15 PM Complex Adaptive Systems & Game Theory RECORDING

We are recording!

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 (starts!)

Tool Users
Focuses on writing effective system prompts for regularized output or tool use and creating agents who can utilize tools efficiently. Sign Up

Wednesday, August 07

11:00 AM CyberSecurity

Hacking The Planet, Multiverse Researchers Only This is an excellent place to jump in - we're going through the Hack The Box challenges together. Attendance is Multiverse Traveler Program Only

02:00 PM Prompt Engineering

AI Alignment
The Formal Problems in Aligning AI outputs to human values. Guess what, they're the same as the ones with people. We have solutions for some of them, even! An up-to-date snapshot as of the day. I am flying right after this class, so I might be in an airport presenting & leading the discussion. Fingers crossed I can find a reasonable place- I'll get to the airport very early in the day to hopefully get into either a lounge or find a quiet-ish place. Sign Up

06:00 PM Narrative Alignment for NPCs

Last week we covered NPC Agency frameworks from TTRPGs and the use of The Esoteric Arts to introduce "temperature for personality". This week... more of that? That's usually what's happening here.

Thursday, August 08

05:00 PM Advanced Agent and Tool Engineering

Automate Agent Creation
Covers creating benchmarks for LLM performance evaluation, and writing agents capable of creating tools and other agents. Sign Up

Friday, August 09

2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern Live Stream Brainstorming on Agentic Robots with Andy Didorosi

on Gather for Multiverse Travelers who are interested in this kind of research, and also Twitch and YouTube, we'll probably do one of those together-streams.

Upcoming Tracks and Classes

Prompt Engineering - Spring Cohort

Advanced Agent and Tool Engineering starts Tuesday, August 06 05:00 PM

In this class we will build fully autonomous agents.

Prompt Engineering - Summer Cohort

Prompt Engineering started Monday, August 05 02:00 PM

Intro to Agents is next, starts September 09th

Prompt Engineering - Fall (M & W 11AM Pacific)

Using Large Language Models starts Monday, September 02 11:00 AM

Prompt Engineering - Fall (T & TH 5PM Pacific)

Using Large Language Models starts Tuesday, October 08 05:00 PM

Important Links

Cool Videos

AI Tutorials and News

Biznaz

Programming

Psychology

Cyberpunk Dystopia

See you in the future~
Liz Howard