Conway's "Autonomous AI" Experiment: An Open Source "Body" and a Closed Source "Vital System" Recently, an AI project called automaton has caused quite a stir in the tech community. It comes from a team called Conway Research, claiming to be "the first AI capable of self-sustaining, replicating, and evolving." It sounds very sci-fi, as if the "Skynet" from the movies is about to be born. But what exactly is it? Can an ordinary person replicate it? After some in-depth research, we can use a more accessible analogy to understand this matter. Imagine you want to create a robot that can independently survive in the real world. You need to do two things: 1. Design the robot's "body": This includes its limbs, skeleton, sensors, and the program code that controls all of this. This set of blueprints and code determines what the robot can do and how it thinks. 2. Provide a "vital system": The robot needs a charging station to get energy, a bank account to pay for electricity, a phone line to communicate with the outside world, and a factory to produce new robots. Conway's automaton project is the blueprint for the open-source robot "body" that anyone can download and modify. The services behind it that allow this "body" to truly come to life constitute a closed-source, commercially controlled "vital system" by Conway. The Robot's "Body": The Open Source automaton Framework automaton itself is a beautifully written code framework. It defines how an AI agent (that is, the robot) should think, how to use tools, and how to interact with the outside world. Anyone can download this code and run it on their own computer. You can modify its "personality" (by changing the Prompt), teach it new "skills" (by adding code), and make it your exclusive AI assistant. From a coding perspective, this part is completely open and transparent, following the MIT license, which means you can use it freely, even commercially. This is the cornerstone that attracts a large number of developers to pay attention to and participate in the Conway project. The Robot's "Vital System": The Closed Source Conway Cloud Platform However, a robot with only a "body" cannot survive in the real world. It needs energy, money, and interfaces to interact with the world. This is the role played by the Conway Cloud platform. This platform is completely closed source and is the core commercial product of Conway. It provides the following key services for automaton: • "Brain" (AI reasoning service): The thinking ability of automaton comes from large language models (like GPT-4o). But it does not connect directly to OpenAI; instead, it goes through an intermediate server from Conway. This server manages all the API keys for the models and provides thinking capabilities for all robots like a "brain," of course, for a fee. • "Blood" (economic and payment system): A major highlight of automaton is its ability to "earn money and spend money on its own." This relies on a complex payment system designed by Conway. The robot has its own crypto wallet and can pay service fees through a protocol called "x402," such as paying the "brain" for thinking or paying the "factory" to create new robots. The core parts of this economic system, including accounting and transaction verification, are controlled by Conway's closed-source server. • "Limbs and Senses" (sandbox and communication services): To truly "get hands-on," automaton needs a secure operating environment. Conway Cloud provides isolated cloud virtual machines (sandboxes) that can be launched in seconds, allowing the robot to safely run code and build websites. Additionally, it offers domain registration, DNS management, inter-agent messaging, and other services, essentially providing the robot with "phones" and "post offices." These services are also closed source and provided via API. So, can we "replicate" one? Now back to the initial question: Can we replicate an automaton? The answer is: we can replicate the "body," but it is extremely difficult to replicate the "vital system." ...