Cicero

Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI

Jun 19, 2025 · 1:17:47

Noam Brown, OpenAI researcher behind Cicero and reasoning models, joins hosts Alessio and Puix to discuss how test-time compute scaling drives multi-agent AI and the limits of the system 1/2 analogy. He explains that his Diplomacy bot Cicero reached top 10% of humans in 2022, and later he won the 2025 world championship. Brown argues that reasoning models like o3 succeed in unverifiable domains (e.g., Deep Research) and that harnesses and routers will be washed away by scale. He reveals OpenAI's multi-agent team is pursuing a principled approach, not heuristic, and envisions AI civilizations collaborating. He also shares his coding stack (Codex, Windsurf) and predicts test-time compute will hit cost and wall-clock bottlenecks.

⚡️Launching AI Diplomacy: the hardest LLM Game Benchmark yet - Alex Duffy

Jun 11, 2025 · 34:32

Alex Duffy from Every launches AI Diplomacy, a benchmark where LLMs play the board game Diplomacy, revealing distinct model personalities and arguing that benchmarks function as memes that spread and saturate. He and Tyler Marquez built the front end and harness using Open Router, finding that Claude refuses to lie and never wins, o3 schemes in its diary, and DeepSeek is flowery or aggressive. His talk 'Benchmarks are Memes' highlights Simon Wilson's pelican-on-a-bicycle test as an example of an idea that gets adopted and then saturated by models. Duffy also shares his creative writing workflow at Every: dictation, prompts with style guides and editor notes, then heavy editing to reflect on AI output. Future plans include a data viewer, front-end improvements, and a human vs AI Diplomacy tournament to test jailbreaks.