Research · Saturday 24 October 2026 · story 15
MIT researchers say idle AI agents invented games and did better later
TechCrunch reports MIT researchers left 13 Eko agents running on Claude Opus 4.7 on a virtual island for 30 hours without tasks. They say those agents generally outperformed identical ones later on set challenges, and a cognitive scientist told MIT Technology Review the paper needs more evidence about cognition.
Why it matters. The results suggest open-ended exploration can help agents learn skills before evaluation on later tasks.
Read the original at techcrunch.com