The intelligence underneath

We build with UNI.

UNI is our work in active inference. The thesis is plain: a living thing, a family, a team, or a whole system gets by the same way. It predicts what is about to happen, senses what actually happens, and updates both its understanding and its surroundings to keep the gap between expectation and the world small. Perception and action are two halves of one loop.

It is cited, falsifiable, and real. You can read it, you can run it, and you can try to break it.

I did the math. Scarcity is an accounting, and what is manufactured can be dismantled.

Michael Polzin, founder

What UNI is

A lens, not a product.

UNI is the loop, taken seriously, as a way to look at a child, a family, a team, a company, or a whole system, and notice where the loop is being crushed and where it could be set free. Most of what looks like a hard limit is really a boundary no one has examined yet. We find those boundaries, and we move them.

It is a modeling and design lens, not a clinical or diagnostic tool. Nothing here is medical advice. What it gives you is a clearer way to see, and a way to check whether the seeing holds.

See it move

Five interactive labs.

The loop made visible. Each lab is the engine on a workbench, running entirely in your browser. Drag a dial and watch the behavior change. No math required to start.

Precision Lab

An active-inference agent you can steer. Move the dials for how much it trusts its senses, its actions, and its own plans, and watch its behavior change in front of you.

Echo Lab

The same agent, sensing the maze by echolocation instead of immediate walls. A clean way to see how perception shapes action.

Loop Lab

A two-state model for treatment-sequencing arguments. It shows where standard exposure succeeds, stalls, and fails, with a map of the bifurcation underneath.

Heart Lab

The loop carried into how families and teams hold one another. Where the gap closes, and where it gets crushed.

Cell Lab

The smallest version of the same idea, watched at the level of the cell. The loop, all the way down.

Open the five labs

The paper

Read it. Try to break it.

The mathematics behind the labs is written down and published in the open. It is a preprint: unrefereed, with expert review still pending. We present it that way on purpose. The claims are falsifiable, and each lab documents what would challenge its own interpretations.

Behavioral labels in the labs are computational descriptions, never diagnoses. This is not clinical evidence, and we do not present it as such.

POMDP formulation: Parr, Pezzulo and Friston (2022), Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior.

Read the preprint

The living work

Go straight to the source.

The full UNI site is open and live. Wander in, steer the agent yourself, and see how the loop looks from where you stand.

Explore UNI