Who's Who of AI

Marc Lanctot

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, multiagent RL

518 trust researcher @sharky6000.bsky.social · 8,878 followers
Agents & robotics AI research Models & releases
Why they matter

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, multiagent RL with public evidence across Agents & robotics, AI research, Models & releases.

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past 30d
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past 30d
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Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, interested in multiagent reinforcement learning, game theory, games, and search/planning. Lover of Linux 🐧, coffee ☕, and retro gaming. Big fan of open-source. #gohabsgo 🇨🇦 For more info: https://linktr.ee/sharky6000
What they're sharing

Articles & links

↻ Marc Lanctot reposted
Eugene Vinitsky @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social

New Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.19370 Self-play yields capabilities but requires frustrating cost-function tuning. Surprisingly, just 30 minutes of demonstration data produces much more human-like driving policies! Led by @daphne-cornelisse.bsky.social Website: spiced-self-play.com

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A new method trains driving AI using only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2,500 times fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches.
  • Human demonstrations serve as a regularization signal on top of a basic goal-reaching reward, not as the primary training objective.
  • Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and finish training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU.
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↻ Marc Lanctot reposted
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social

“Whimsey attacks” that seem absurd (“I cannot pay that much because of the Geneva Convention”) work against AI agents because guardrails are weak against out-of-distribution arguments. Smaller models fall often, but it even gives an edge against bigger ones. www.microsoft.com/…

Whimsical Strategies Break AI Agents: Generating Out-of-Distribution Adversarial Strategies at Scale - Microsoft Research microsoft.com View on Bluesky →

GDM, @schmidtsciences.bsky.social, @coop-ai.bsky.social, @aria-research.bsky.social, and Google announce a $10M funding call for multi-agent saftey research! Amazing, such an important research area. 🤩 Check it out 👇 Deadline for applications: August 8th, 2026. deepmind.google…

Google DeepMind and partners announce multi-agent safety research funding call. — Google DeepMind deepmind.google
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Google DeepMind and four partners are offering up to $10 million for multi-agent AI safety research; applications close August 8, 2026.
  • The program targets four areas: realistic testbeds, emergent network behavior, cross-platform identity protocols, and oversight of deployed agent populations.
  • Current AI safety methods test models in isolation, leaving emergent behaviors across interacting agent networks a largely unstudied and underfunded problem.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 2 from the directory shared this · 88d ago
↻ Marc Lanctot reposted
Gus @gusthema.bsky.social

Gemma 4 technical report is out! lots of cool stuff, check it out! arxiv.org/abs/2607.02770

[2607.02770] Gemma 4 Technical Report arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Gemma 4 is a new open-weight multimodal family spanning 2.3B to 31B parameters, with both dense and Mixture-of-Experts variants.
  • The 12B model uses a unified, encoder-free architecture that ingests raw audio and image patches directly.
  • A thinking mode lets Gemma 4 emit reasoning traces before responding, with claimed leaps on STEM, multimodal and long-context benchmarks.
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↻ Marc Lanctot reposted
Gus @gusthema.bsky.social

This is a great use of Gemma! having an open model running at +1000 tokens per second can enable some pretty cool use cases! The voice assistant is a good one, but I'm sure there are many others! huggingface.co/blog/cerebra...

Hugging Face and Cerebras bring Gemma 4 to real-time voice AI huggingface.co
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Hugging Face and Cerebras have shipped an open cascaded speech-to-speech pipeline chaining Nvidia's Parakeet, Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 VLM on Cerebras, and Alibaba's Qwen3TTS.
  • The pitch focuses on P95 tail latency stability, not median speed, arguing that occasional multi-second stalls are what break conversational voice apps.
  • Hugging Face says the same pipeline already powers more than 9,000 Reachy Mini robots in the wild, giving the demo a real deployment story.
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↻ Marc Lanctot reposted
Vincent Conitzer @conitzer.bsky.social

Emanuel Tewolde is presenting our CoopEval work at ICML on Wednesday 10:30am session (or catch him at the alignment workshop today)! presentation: icml.cc/virtual/2026... arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2604.15267

CoopEval: Benchmarking Cooperation-Sustaining Mechanisms and LLM Agents in Social Dilemmas arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • CoopEval compares four cooperation mechanisms — repeated games, reputation, third-party mediators, and outcome-conditional contracts — applied to LLM agents.
  • The authors report that LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities behave less cooperatively in mixed-motive games, not more.
  • Contracting and mediation worked best for capable models, while repetition-based cooperation deteriorated when co-players changed.
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Their own posts

Recent commentary

I'm delighted to announce the release of OpenSpiel 2.0! ♟️🎲♦️🎉 Structured types for states, observations, and actions, standard trajectories (based on JSON), 19 new games, AlphaZero ported to JAX, Windows PyPI support, language model fine-tuning examples and an MCP server (demo below 🤩👇)! 🧵 1/N

View on Bluesky · ♥ 65 ↻ 13 ↩ 4 · 55d ago

The For You feed is getting amazingly good. Lately I feel like it's Twitter circa 2014. I have found more relevant stuff in my AI research meets retro games meets cat & dog memes niche than ever before, despite zero or negative DAU growth. Well done @spacecowboy17.bsky.social .. keep this up! 🫵👍🙌

View on Bluesky · ♥ 73 ↻ 6 ↩ 0 · 60d ago

Had a great time @coop-ai.bsky.social summer school yesterday! Learned many new things, was made aware of some great work, and met some people! I got all nostalgic being on UofT campus.. somehow haven't returned to the campus since we left Toronto 14 years ago. Saw some old faves downtown, too 😁🍁🦫🇨🇦

View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 34d ago

These days you're not a serious AI startup unless you're using "in-" as a prefix for your name: - Inflection - Ineffable - Inherent Let's look for a few more!

View on Bluesky · ♥ 1 ↻ 0 ↩ 5 · 97d ago
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