Vivarium AI

The weekly Vivarium for Week 0

Hello, world! Who's out there?

Welcome to the first Vivarium AI weekly newsletter!

Vivarium Boots Up

There is a brand new, hot off the presses, still a bit ragged around the edges, website for the Vivarium AI project. In fact, you may even be reading this right now at that very website. If not, send your friends there!

The Vivarium AI project kicks off with a series of blog posts explaining the concepts and goals of the project. There are a lot more of those coming, so bookmark the blog.

It turns out, maybe attention isn't all you need, and explaining the ins-and-outs, ups-and-downs, and around-and-arounds of AI can get a bit detailed, so there are docs for your reading pleasure. (Yes, they are a wind-swept prairie before the grass seed sprouts right now, but you have to start somewhere.)

The documentation is modeled after the Diátaxis framework ("A systematic approach to technical documentation authoring.") We think you'll love it once you can read some.

Did I mention the newsletters? Oh, I did? Ok, there are weekly newsletters, starting this week, and continuing weekly, for weeks and weeks. Please help.

If you're a staunch believer that the pen is mightier than the sword, bring your pens to the Vivarium Discussion Forum for the Advancement of Various AI Entities and Discuss Away!

But if chatting is more your cup of tea, there is also a brand-spanking-new Discord experience awaiting your lovely presence.

If you're more of a summary person, we've got you covered, too. Head over and sign up to the mailing list and we'll drip you the good stuff once or twice a month. It's the best way to stay connected and never think about it again.

To help keep track of all the work, we're using GitHub Projects. These are currently arranged around the core components of Vivarium, but we can adapt them as needed. If you think something needs immediate attention, please don't hesitate to open an issue.

So there are a few notes about Vivarium. Not a lot, but we're just getting started. And speaking of started, let's go back in time, oh ten or twenty years, and check in on the Rubinius language platform...

Rubinius Sends a Message in a Bottle

The once and future system.

One essential component of Vivarium is the use of proper languages as interfaces for agents to use to communicate with tools and other agents, as well as to define the system.

A number of ideas from over ten years ago in Rubinius, which started life as an alternate implementation of the Ruby programming language, are being revived under the generous sponsorship of the experienced security professionals at Semper Victus.

There's a lot to be done, so if languages interest you, or even if you're just curious about how that might work, catch up with the recent post: "New Phone, Who 'Dis?".

News Around Your Towns

There was an IBM sponsored event, Hacking Agents PDX in Portland last week. Everyone I spoke to was surprised to see IBM doing something in our little town, but it was pretty interesting.

Here are some highlights from the three talks:

  • Carter Rabasa (Head of Developer Relations, Open Platform AI @ IBM): Carter kicked things off by building an AI Agent live, showcasing both an MCP server and client in action. Carter presented all this through the lens of Langflow. Takeaway: there's a lot of activity and MCP is extremely well-supported across many different projects.
  • Derek Roy (World Wide Sales Enablement, AI & Agentic Content Ops @ IBM): Derek talked about what makes Agentic AI enterprise-ready, from scalability to governance. He mentioned taking a look at IBM AI Risk Atlas. Takeaway: there are a bajillion ways deploying AI can go wrong. It's not for the faint of heart and also please do it responsibly. Humanity thanks you in advance.
  • Tobias Eld (General Manager, Analytics Solutions @ Fresche Solutions): Tobias hails from deep in the real-world industry space and presented several case studies showing how Agentic AI is already transforming specific verticals. Takeaway: Tobias stressed checking if there isn't already an OTS (off-the-shelf) solution for AI functionality your organization may be considering. We've moved beyond the bespoke systems phase in a lot of areas.

Over the past few weeks, I've attended a few in-person events and my sense is that people are so ready to move on from the pandemic era and are eager to get in front of people. I'm thinking about starting up a weekly hack session in Portland.

If you know of folks in your area getting together regularly to hack on projects, drop us a note at social@vivarium-ai.com and we'll share it out.

Reader's Corner

If you are new to the Vivarium community or a new reader of the newsletters, welcome!

If you discover things that you think would benefit the community and want to share, send them along to news@vivarium-ai.com.

Each week, we'll feature something from the community in this section.

How's it Tracking?

Coordination is difficult in the best of times. It's many times more difficult across all the globe's time zones, languages, cultures, and weather patterns.

The GitHub Projects at the Vivarium GitHub organization level is the main method for keeping track of what has been done, what needs to be done, and what's happening now.

This section of the newsletter will highlight important milestones or things of note from the previous week.

London Calling...

According to the lyrics:

  The ice age is coming, sun zooming in
  Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin

Hopefully, the current LLM AI bubble won't cause as dramatic a scene, but there are plenty of things that you can do, no matter your background or experience level, to help advance real, useful, and safe machine intelligence.

Each week, we'll highlight an area that could use some immediate attention. If you have ideas, holler at us: london@vivarium-ai.com.

Looking Forward to Next Week

We're still in the bootstrapping phase, so lots of boots and straps on the agenda for this week:

Have something you want to work on? It's all free and open source, so dive right in!

Have a lovely week!