Sebastian Risi

Kenneth Stanley Verified account @kenneth0stanley · 19h

Research News! Announcing the 1st release of fundamental AI research from the Open-Endedness Team @LilaSciences: a vision-focused blog + 4 preprints. The blog details a broad research agenda for achieving open-endedness while each paper unveils its own novel research direction.

The ideas covered in the papers include:

• a novel approach to training for creativity designed to sidestep a newly-identified problem called the “creative paradox,” which means that directly reinforcing creative outputs can sometimes limit reaching full creative potential;

• an investigation of the advantages of seeing the world through fresh eyes by training an LLM that is intentionally naïve in a certain area (in effect presenting less data as a potential advantage);

• a new kind of training regularization technique for SGD called unified factored organizers (UFOs), which is designed to achieve unified factored representation (UFR) as seen in Picbreeder CPPNs;

• and finally a unique study of catastrophic forgetting that shows that networks with UFR (like those from Picbreeder) are intrinsically resistant to catastrophic forgetting. The inset video on this post is a visualization from that catastrophic forgetting work.

The blog post also includes an interactive “wheel of science” demo.

The implications of these ideas are broad and diverse, but the fun part is that each one opens up its own new research playground - there is a lot of room for further research here!

Moreover, we hope this release also highlights one other important point about AI today: while it may seem that the road ahead is already paved and all that’s left is to drive mindlessly forward, there actually remains a lot of room for new directions and insights in the pursuit of open-endedness and creativity.

This research was possible because @LilaSciences appreciates the critical role of open-ended innovation in the pursuit of scientific superintelligence. The advances you see here are part of this much larger company-wide ambition, which includes AI Science Factories and many other unprecedented components. When this engine is fueled by open-endedness, the result will be much more than a step change.

More advances in open-endedness are coming!

Blog link below 👇

View quoted post on X

Stefania Druga Verified account @Stefania_druga · Oct 27

Yesterday the @SakanaAILabs RSI Lab took the stage at Hitotsubashi Hall, with a keynote by @SchmidhuberAI, @hardmaru on why we have to think differently, @iwiwi on pretraining our own foundation model, Sawara, here in Japan, and @RobertTLange on The AI Scientist 🐟 and @risi1979 I spoke about world models for physical AI 🤖

View quoted post on X

Sebastian Risi Verified account @risi1979 · Nov 20, 2025

I’m beyond excited to announce our MIT Press book on Neuroevolution! An HTML version is now available for free on neuroevolutionbook.com, with a print edition coming out later in 2026.

Real intelligence is not static; it evolves. For decades, the field of neuroevolution has pursued this necessary adaptability. Our book chronicles its development, from early concepts to its modern integration with deep learning and reinforcement learning, exploring its potential for understanding the origins of intelligence and its real-world applications.

And the companion webpage is more than just a book site! It comes equipped with interactive demos, videos, exercises, and tutorials to allow everyone to experience neuroevolution in action. Check it out and let us know what you think!

It was a pleasure to work on this book over the last 4+ years with David (@hardmaru), Yujin (@yujin_tang), and Risto. We are incredibly proud of the result and look forward to celebrating! We hope to connect with many of you at NeurIPS.

We are very grateful to Melanie Mitchell (@MelMitchell1) who provided a fantastic foreword. To quote her: “The next big thing in AI is coming, and I suspect that neuroevolution will be a major part of it”. We think so too!

View quoted post on X