2025 Quarterly Roundtable #2

All right. Hello. Welcome, everyone. It is June 27th, 2025, and this is the second quarterly roundtable of the year of 2025. So here we go. Welcome to Active Inference Institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. This is a recorded and an archived live stream, so provide any feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome, and we'll follow video etiquette for live streams and see if anyone joins along the way. Here's a slide you can screenshot if you want to have some short links that will stay good forever, even though their referent may change, and ways to get involved. Here's what's on the agenda today. First, we will go over some institute scale updates, then talk about some project scale updates, look a little bit towards the second half of the year, then have a view from the desk of why active inference and why the institute, and then I will look at the live chat to see if there are any comments or questions that can be addressed. So here we go, starting with some updates at the institute scale. If you go to 2025.activeinference.institute, you will find a living entry point for the year as it happens, and ecosystem.activeinference.institute is the entry point. So one piece that'll be fun and new today is there will be this red shaded box with specific requests or opportunities. So if you're looking for ways to contribute, ways to get involved, these are just specific ways that you can pick up on some slide that you find interesting and take it from there. So if that's interesting, jump on in to the ecosystem document and learn a lot more. Okay, today we have a special announcement, which is that the institute has been awarded a $270,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund to support work on the AI Capabilities and Alignment Consensus Project, AI CICP. AI CICP is a multi-year initiative designed to reshape the conversation around AI capabilities, alignment, and regulation. By combining high-impact journal collections, in-person discussion-oriented workshops, and academic media content for public outreach, research. The project aims to bridge the divide between AI doomers and accelerationists through deeply exploring the meaning of world models and agency and what these concepts mean for AI development. Adam Saffron at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University is the creator, principal investigator, and organizing editor for this project. The grant supports also an expanded team to assist with efforts to manage the special issues and workshops, including these contributors. Lead assistant editor, Victoria Climage. Media lead and workshop organizer, Michael Garfield. Workshop project supervisor, Amelia Thonley. And workshop experience designer, Caitlin Lynch. Email Adam if you have any thoughts or questions. And moving from that project scale announcement to what it means for the institute today, we are happy to announce that grants. And there are many more grants to come. So consider proposing or funding a grant with or for us. There's going to be a lot of ways that this single grant helps us develop the administrative ability to, for example, receive and disperse grants, the oversight that we need and look to have, and the wisdom in choosing different kinds of ways to allocate our resources, financial, attentional, otherwise. And with taking a small to zero overhead on different grants and different philanthropic pathways, I hope that people can see some exciting possibilities for ways that we can host all kinds of work. So looking forward to the AI CACP project and what they all get done over the coming year. And also ways that we can turn that n equals one today into an n equals question mark and plus tomorrow with all that can happen when we work together this way. So thank you also to the team, to Adam Saffron and colleagues, and of course to the funders. This is an exciting opportunity. It…