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.