No Agent Is an Island: Ori and the Skill Commons

AI agents are getting good at doing pieces of research, such as searching literature, writing code, working with data, and making plots. But a useful research agent needs more: it needs to learn how a community actually works.

In this talk, I’ll introduce Ori (Open Research Intern), our AI research assistant at AIP, and the Skill Commons, a database where researchers can share practical know-how as skills. Ori can search the Commons, bring in new skills, and contribute back the knowledge it learned. The aim is not one agent that knows everything, but an ecosystem in which researchers teach their agents, and those agents learn from one another. It starts at AIP, but doesn't stop there.