2025 Quarterly Roundtable #4

All right. Hello. Welcome. It is December 19th, 2025. We are at the Active Inference Institute Quarterly Roundtable number four in 2025. It's Daniel and Alexandra, and we are going to jump right in to this quarterly roundtable. We're going to begin with a sort of fresh take overview, a welcome starting from zero, go into some institute updates, project updates, then look towards 26, look in the live chat, see what people have written, and looking forward to it. Okay. Welcome. Welcome to the Active Inference Institute. Consider this your pre-flight onboarding manual before we take flight into the open skies of the free energy principle and beyond. The title of each of these pages is a URL that you can visit and explore. This is a manual curation and overview presented in late 2025. First, about the ecosystem. At the Institute, our mission is to promote the accessibility, applicability, and rigor of Active Inference. We exist in constellation and interaction. We welcome all to observe at a distance through publicly available materials, to engage directly through projects, discord, different programs such as the internship and fellowship, and to get involved behind the scenes in supporting all of this as supporter, advisor, partner, director, etc. We recognize the broader cosmos of our ecosystem, the Active Inference learners, researchers, practitioners, organizations, and companies who are co-creating the present and future of our field. Participation means you are the chaotic input to us and possibly us to you. In this symbiotic relationship, all parties may either change their minds and change the world. Our strategy. Our approach is radically informed by Active Inference itself. We embrace open-ended exploration as a fundamental driving force. We cultivate a culture of curiosity and continuous learning. Through engaging in endeavors across multiple scales, be it person, project, institute, or ecosystem, we enrich our understanding and contribute to our niche. We see our actions in light of minimizing free energy, much like the equation 2.6 in the 2022 textbook, consisting of pragmatic and epistemic value. In doing so, we carve a path that is both useful and informative in completing technical, operational, and even administrative tasks. Alright, about activities. There are a variety of weekly meetings and activities hosted at the Institute, and also a bunch of stuff ongoing asynchronously. Some synchronous events, maybe your style or your time zone, and there are ample opportunities to explore projects on your own time as well. Admission is free and open to all educational backgrounds. We invite you to participate, connect with others, co-create, learn, and apply Active Inference together. We invite our ecosystem to join us in setting out their expectations in planned actions. Via the preparation form, we provide a place for you to inform the community about your ongoing and upcoming projects. If desired, we can call out to publicize your project and attract collaborators. Every journey begins with preparation, even dreams that don't leave the base camp. And, in turn, we take measurements to follow up on our questions and predictions. We take actions to get new observations. Submitting a measurement is the main way that participants in our ecosystem share updates from their work for getting visibility, feedback, and collaboration. Measurements are curated into our monthly newsletter and also presented on in the quarterly roundtables. Through this prepare measure cycle, we engage in Active Inference and co-learn by doing. In conclusion, you can reference these stable links throughout the year and continue to engage with the institute. To reduce your uncertainty further, you can email our blanket at active inference dot institute email. Here's some more stable links that you can always enter into and they'll go to the most updated version of whatever that may be. Some special stable links and topics that will come up today are…