Cyrus Clarke, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, connected an OpenClaw agent to a 900-pin shape display and asked it to discover its own identity rather than complete tasks. The talk covers the agent's first behaviors, the public reaction, the philosophical influences behind his approach to AI embodiment, and a closed-loop system that taught the agent a gesture-based body language that now responds faster than its language model.
Project Nanda introduces the Agentic Web, an open infrastructure designed to break AI agents out of "walled gardens" and enable truly interconnected, autonomous interactions. It focuses on three core layers: Discovery, using the Nanda Index for agents to find and trust each other; Commerce, facilitating "knowledge pricing" markets for agents to pay for intelligence and services; and the Bazaar, fostering machine co-learning through the Nanda Town simulator, a sandbox for testing large-scale agent coordination and protocols. This initiative aims to establish an open, permissionless ecosystem for trillions of AI agents.