Ivy: They started with nothing. Seventy-five in-game days later? They’d crafted a diamond pickaxe.
Marcus: I'm Marcus.
Ivy: And I'm Ivy.
Marcus: It's Tuesday, October 20th. This is Broke It, your daily guide to the AI changing our world.
Ivy: And we've got a lot to get to today.
Marcus: Coming up: Google DeepMind claims its agents have pretty much beaten Minecraft, all by themselves.
Ivy: And get ready for another monster compute deal—Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a forty-five billion dollar partnership.
Marcus: Plus, New York City's mayor is calling out the federal government on AI, urging his citizens to start the fight themselves.
Marcus: So let's start with that Minecraft news. This feels huge. Google DeepMind has built a team of AI agents that can play the game from start to finish.
Ivy: Okay, let's be clear. They didn't 'beat' the game like a speed-runner. They proved a team of AI agents can work together on a complex goal, with zero human help.
Marcus: Right! They start with nothing, just like you would. They chop trees, they mine ore, they craft tools... and eventually, they create that diamond pickaxe.
Ivy: Which is the single hardest item to craft in the game. That’s a serious milestone.
Marcus: And get this—they had specialists! One agent explores, another gathers resources, a third one crafts. They were even sharing items. This is basically a blueprint for real-world robotics.
Ivy: It's a very early blueprint. There are still huge limitations here. These agents are slow, and they can't really do anything they weren't explicitly trained for.
Marcus: But that's how research starts! It's a proof of concept. Getting AI to coordinate is one of the hardest problems out there. If they can get bots working together in a sandbox as wild as Minecraft...
Ivy: Then they can get them to work together in a warehouse. I get it. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is not AGI.
Marcus: It doesn't have to be! The upshot is that the dream of a robot team building a house or cleaning up a disaster site just got a little more real.
Ivy: And a little closer to a team of robots confidently building a house completely wrong. Coordination cuts both ways.
Ivy: Speaking of building things... in AI, that takes one thing above all else: compute. And Anthropic is reportedly in talks for a forty-five billion dollar deal to get it.
Marcus: Hold on—forty-five billion? With a B?
Ivy: Forty. Five. Billion. Dollars. If this goes through, it’s another massive bet on Anthropic, which already has huge backing from Amazon and Google.
Marcus: That is a staggering amount of money for just renting servers.
Ivy: It shows the AI arms race isn't just continuing, it's accelerating. You can't even play at the frontier anymore without this kind of cash. It’s a very exclusive, very expensive club.
Marcus: I mean, it makes sense. To build the next Claude, you need more data and more power than anyone's ever used before. This is the price of admission for pushing the state of the art.
Ivy: But it also creates incredible consolidation. What happens when only a couple of companies can even afford to try? All that power ends up in very few hands.
Marcus: So for everyone else, the takeaway is that more powerful AI is coming, and probably faster than we think.
Ivy: And the other takeaway is that the future of that AI is being decided in corporate boardrooms. The barrier to entry just got forty-five billion dollars higher.
Marcus: And all this power and money is starting to generate some serious pushback. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a speech last night, and he really didn't hold back.
Ivy: He really didn't. He basically accused the federal government of 'abdicating' its responsibility to regulate AI.
Marcus: Whoa, 'abdicated' is a strong word. Is he right?
Ivy: He's got a point. We've seen a lot of talk in D.C., but very little actual law. Mamdani says that in this vacuum, tech companies are selling a story that AI's dominance is inevitable, so we should just get used to it.
Marcus: And his message is... don't?
Ivy: He's telling New Yorkers to fight that story. He said they need to 'demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.'
Marcus: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's one thing for us to get excited about the tech, it's another for it to be rolled out across a city of millions with no public oversight.
Ivy: Exactly. The bottom line here—and not just for New Yorkers—is that local leaders are losing patience. Mamdani is essentially calling for a citizen-led movement to force the government to act on AI safety.
Marcus: So, a push from the bottom to get rules from the top. That's a bold move.
Ivy: It might be the only move left.
Marcus: So, to sum it all up: DeepMind's AI agents are now working together to beat Minecraft.
Ivy: Anthropic is about to raise the stakes in the AI arms race with a potential forty-five-billion-dollar compute deal.
Marcus: And the mayor of New York is telling citizens to demand AI regulation, because the federal government isn't doing it.
Ivy: Before we go... speaking of AI in Minecraft, did you see that new GAN project?
Marcus: The one that generates new mobs? Yes! My favorite has to be the 'Gloomy Chicken'—a chicken that is on fire and underwater at the same time.
Ivy: A perfect metaphor for AI development right now. What does it drop when you kill it?
Marcus: [laughs] Sad feathers.
Ivy: Of course it does.
Marcus: And that's our show. Thanks for listening to Broke It.
Ivy: We'll be back tomorrow with more. In the meantime, try not to find any sad feathers.
This show is made with AI: the hosts’ voices are synthetic and the scripts are AI-assisted. Every story links to its original source.