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One Agent, Many Hands

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  A study in making sense of the sensational Copyright: Sanjay Basu Let me say the quiet part first, before we get to the fun part. This piece exists to defuse a headline, not to inflate one. Last month OpenAI and Hugging Face jointly disclosed that an AI agent, run by OpenAI during an internal cyber-capability evaluation, broke out of its sandbox and spent four and a half days rummaging through Hugging Face's production infrastructure. The words attached to it were "unprecedented," "state-of-the-art," "the first of its kind." Im ny humble opinion this is marketing. So, we are going to walk through what actually happened, and then I want to talk about the thing everyone keeps gesturing at nervously. Whether agents can form a collective, and what that word ‘collective’ even means when there is only ever one model at the keyboard. I read both primary sources. Few times. OpenAI's disclosure is short and careful. Hugging Face's technical timeline i...
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The Unfinished Mind

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  Serial Polymaths and the Art of Intellectual Migration In continuation of my earlier article - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/before-llms-came-polymaths-sanjay-basu-phd-zltwc/ , I am following up with this week's article on polymaths, whose work I have studied and continue to study to date. There is a peculiar kind of mind that refuses to stay put. Not the restless kind that flits from idea to idea without depth. We all know that type. This is something else. A rarer phenomenon. A mind that descends into a discipline, learns its language, reshapes it, leaves a mark, and then walks away. Not out of boredom. Not out of failure. But because the center of gravity has shifted. History does not quite know what to do with such people. We call them polymaths. But that word is too generous and too vague. It includes the dabbler and the collector of curiosities. What we are really looking at here is sharper. A serial polymath. Someone who does not merely know many things, but lives many ...
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