VLI: built to interact, not to obey.
A digital system with agency cannot only take orders. To act in the world it has to interact with the world, and with everything in it: people, objects, surfaces, forces, signals, other systems. Vision-Language-Interaction makes interaction itself the objective, not task-completion and not obedience. An order-following system is only ever ready for the orders it was given; a system built to maximize interaction is, by construction, assembling the repertoire it needs to act in any situation it meets, interaction is how it meets the world and learns what it can do there. We have watched machines move with intention for a century, in the films and the anime and the toys on the shelf, long before one could be built; what is new is that interaction, not command, can now be the thing a system is built to maximize. The lab's effort, Ambit, is its own, and it is grounded: every interaction runs on the MathGround substrate, so each decision to engage the world carries a joules receipt and a replayability class.
ambit on GitHub ↗The agent reaches out to everything in its world, people, objects, surfaces, forces, signals. As interaction coverage grows, so does its readiness for situations it was never given. Order-following touches only a sliver of the world.
In the field · the interaction-first idea is surfacing in pieces, concurrent see-hear-speak-act (VITA-E), and policies that learn from their own experience rather than pure imitation (π*0.6). Ambit's line is its own: interaction as the objective itself, grounded and metered on MathGround.
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Reading intent rather than commands already works well enough to be useful, and what it gives you is a prior rather than a guarantee. The open move is composing that prior with a checkable envelope, so a machine can act on what you meant while still proving it will stay safe. That is the same seam the certificate work approaches from the other direction.
One of eight, and only one of them is physics. How we read a frontier →