Smash Notes

Back to Fired OpenAI Safety Researchers Speak Out + We Look Inside Pandora’s Box, with Mikita Balesni & Tomek Korbak.

How Did Four Gemini Agents Beat Minecraft?

Kevin Roose says Google DeepMind reported that four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price. The agents split up tasks, warned each other about threats, recovered items from dead teammates, and logged mistakes in a shared memory. They died 605 times and still finished the game.

Casey Newton says a seven-year-old can also beat Minecraft, and that a model is not AGI to him if it cannot beat Elden Ring. Kevin Roose says tech companies use video games as a training ground, and that Anthropic tested Claude on Pokemon. He says the path to the singularity leads through Minecraft and Pokemon.

Transcript

Fired OpenAI Safety Researchers Speak Out + We Look Inside Pandora’s Box ·

Machine Gods

More from this episode

  1. Why Were Two OpenAI Safety Researchers Fired?Casey Newton says OpenAI fired Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak, and their colleague Jasmine Wang in early October, saying they had violated policies for handling…
  2. How Long Did METR Stay at OpenAI?Tomek Korbak says METR was on the premises of OpenAI for six full days. The visit was supposed to last two days.
  3. Did OpenAI Safety Researchers Show Their Phones?Mikita Balesni says that a week before he and his colleagues were fired, OpenAI pulled them into a security investigation about a leak of OpenAI IP to…
  4. What Did Tomek Korbak Say About Proving Innocence at OpenAI?Tomek Korbak says he and Mikita Balesni both had disappearing messages turned on.
  5. What Did the OpenAI Safety Letter Recommend?Mikita Balesni says the letter to OpenAI's board asked OpenAI to keep working with embedded auditors, to prevent the loss of monitorability, and to…
  6. What Is a Regenerative Urban Energy Center?Jared Krieger, the CEO of KG Growth Partners, said a bid for a downtown San Francisco mall is not a data center in the traditional sense.
  7. What Did Elon Musk Pledge to Every Kid?Casey Newton says Elon Musk pledged on Monday to give one share of his company SpaceX to every kid in America next year.

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