--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- Local Agentic Theory For Mobile Games — Shafik Quoraishee & Joanne Song, The New York Times description: >- An agent runs entirely on your phone, no cloud, and plays Space Invaders, perceiving the scene, predicting the aliens, and dodging bullets in a loop. Another solves the New York Times mini crossword with a constraint graph that backtracks when the fills stop fitting. These are experimental, and the Times is emphatic that its actual puzzles are made by people with no AI in the games. The hard part is the budget: a local agent has to plan its next move inside a single 16 millisecond frame, without draining the battery or starving the renderer, or you get jank. Shafik Quoraishee and Joanne Song use that to argue accessibility and difficulty should stop being separate toggles. Model the game as a continuous negotiation and they become two ends of one dial the agent tunes to you in real time: it watches eye gaze and shaky taps, resizes controls on the fly, and breaks a keyboard trap the moment it detects one, all on the device. Their closing bet is that the future of AI is not one giant centralized brain but billions of small local ones, each shaped by the person it runs for. Speaker info: - https://x.com/squoraishee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shafik-quoraishee/ - https://www.shafikquoraishee.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Disclaimers and the experimental frame 1:55 - A short history of AI in games 2:49 - Why run the AI on the device, not the cloud 4:56 - From reinforcement learning to agentic play 7:00 - Demo: an agent playing Space Invaders 8:19 - The on device budget: space, time, and energy 11:15 - Demo: solving the mini crossword by backtracking 12:33 - Accessibility: from toggles to graded dials 14:40 - The agent tuning the game to you in real time 16:28 - What is still needed, and billions of local brains canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/local-agentic-theory-for-mobile-games-shafik-quorai-110c10111fc5 markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/local-agentic-theory-for-mobile-games-shafik-quorai-110c10111fc5.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T06:51:46.264Z' language: null children: [] videoId: 418t26CVz-w durationSeconds: 1084 publishedAt: '2026-07-23T03:00:01.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 185 endSeconds: 298 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=185' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 298 endSeconds: 310 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=298' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 310 endSeconds: 428 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=310' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 440 endSeconds: 505 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=440' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 516 endSeconds: 681 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=516' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 516 endSeconds: 681 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=516' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 516 endSeconds: 681 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=516' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 681 endSeconds: 692 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=681' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 769 endSeconds: 887 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=769' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 769 endSeconds: 887 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=769' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 898 endSeconds: 988 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=898' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 898 endSeconds: 988 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=898' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 898 endSeconds: 988 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=898' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 998 endSeconds: 1084 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/418t26CVz-w?t=998' heldReason: rights --- # Local Agentic Theory For Mobile Games — Shafik Quoraishee & Joanne Song, The New York Times An agent runs entirely on your phone, no cloud, and plays Space Invaders, perceiving the scene, predicting the aliens, and dodging bullets in a loop. Another solves the New York Times mini crossword with a constraint graph that backtracks when the fills stop fitting. These are experimental, and the Times is emphatic that its actual puzzles are made by people with no AI in the games. The hard part is the budget: a local agent has to plan its next move inside a single 16 millisecond frame, without draining the battery or starving the renderer, or you get jank. Shafik Quoraishee and Joanne Song use that to argue accessibility and difficulty should stop being separate toggles. Model the game as a continuous negotiation and they become two ends of one dial the agent tunes to you in real time: it watches eye gaze and shaky taps, resizes controls on the fly, and breaks a keyboard trap the moment it detects one, all on the device. Their closing bet is that the future of AI is not one giant centralized brain but billions of small local ones, each shaped by the person it runs for. Speaker info: - https://x.com/squoraishee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shafik-quoraishee/ - https://www.shafikquoraishee.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Disclaimers and the experimental frame 1:55 - A short history of AI in games 2:49 - Why run the AI on the device, not the cloud 4:56 - From reinforcement learning to agentic play 7:00 - Demo: an agent playing Space Invaders 8:19 - The on device budget: space, time, and energy 11:15 - Demo: solving the mini crossword by backtracking 12:33 - Accessibility: from toggles to graded dials 14:40 - The agent tuning the game to you in real time 16:28 - What is still needed, and billions of local brains Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/local-agentic-theory-for-mobile-games-shafik-quorai-110c10111fc5 · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.