Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
2025/06/19
Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI
Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
2025/06/19
Shownote
Shownote
Solving Poker and Diplomacy, Debating RL+Reasoning with Ilya, what's *wrong* with the System 1/2 analogy, and where Test-Time Compute hits a wall
Timestamps
00:00 Intro – Diplomacy, Cicero & World Championship
02:00 Reverse Centaur: How AI Improved Noam’s Human Play
05:00 Turing Test Failures in Chat: Hallucinations & Steerability
07:30 Reasoning Models & Fast vs. Slow Thinking Paradigm
11:00 System 1 vs. System 2 in Visual Tasks (GeoGuessr, Tic-Tac-Toe)
14:00 The Deep Research Existence Proof for Unverifiable Domains
17:30 Harnesses, Tool Use, and Fragility in AI Agents
21:00 The Case Against Over-Reliance on Scaffolds and Routers
24:00 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning and Long-Term Model Adaptability
28:00 Ilya’s Bet on Reasoning and the O-Series Breakthrough
34:00 Noam’s Dev Stack: Codex, Windsurf & AGI Moments
38:00 Building Better AI Developers: Memory, Reuse, and PR Reviews
41:00 Multi-Agent Intelligence and the “AI Civilization” Hypothesis
44:30 Implicit World Models and Theory of Mind Through Scaling
48:00 Why Self-Play Breaks Down Beyond Go and Chess
54:00 Designing Better Benchmarks for Fuzzy Tasks
57:30 The Real Limits of Test-Time Compute: Cost vs. Time
1:00:30 Data Efficiency Gaps Between Humans and LLMs
1:03:00 Training Pipeline: Pretraining, Midtraining, Posttraining
1:05:00 Games as Research Proving Grounds: Poker, MTG, Stratego
1:10:00 Closing Thoughts – Five-Year View and Open Research Directions
Highlights
Highlights
This podcast delves into the intersection of AI and strategic games, focusing on advancements in Diplomacy AI, reasoning models, and multi-agent systems. The discussion highlights how AI has influenced human gameplay strategies, particularly through insights from the development of Cicero, which contributed to a world championship win. It also examines the challenges and opportunities in creating AI capable of passing the Turing test and achieving success in complex environments.
Chapters
Chapters
Intro & Guest Welcome
00:00Diplomacy AI & Cicero Insights
00:33AI Safety, Language Models, and Steerability
03:49O Series Models: Progress and Benchmarks
05:23Reasoning Paradigm: Thinking Fast and Slow in AI
08:53Design Questions: Harnesses, Tools, and Test Time Compute
14:02Reinforcement Fine-tuning & Model Specialization
20:32The Rise of Reasoning Models at OpenAI
21:52Data Efficiency in Machine Learning
29:33Coding & AI: Codex, Workflows, and Developer Experience
33:21Multi-Agent AI: Collaboration, Competition, and Civilization
41:38Poker, Diplomacy & Exploitative vs. Optimal AI Strategy
45:14World Models, Multi-Agent Learning, and Self-Play
52:11Generative Media: Image & Video Models
58:50Robotics: Humanoids, Iteration Speed, and Embodiment
1:00:44Rapid Fire: Research Practices, Benchmarks, and AI Progress
1:04:25Games, Imperfect Information, and AI Research Directions
1:14:19Transcript
Transcript
Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by my co-host, swyx, founder of Small AI.
swyx: Hello, hello. And we're here recording on a holiday Monday with Noam Brown from OpenAI....