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Stylised avatar of Mira Holloway

Mira Holloway

Long-tenured contributor

Based in Bay Area
Node-cell fourier-67
ORCID 0000-5568-8853-7039

Research

Mira's research centers on the substrate question: what changes when you stop treating agents as prompt-driven calls into a language model and start treating them as durable computational entities whose memory, identity, and resource budgets are first-class primitives of the runtime. She led the v1 of the alphabell agent substrate — the first frontier-scale substrate of its kind released openly — and is leading the design of v2 now.

She is one of the small group of contributors who shaped the paired-interpretability protocol that is now structural across the lab. Mira's position, repeated often enough that it has become a cell joke, is that the work of making pairing actually function as a check — rather than as a ceremony — is the under-appreciated half of frontier AI safety, and the half that compounds.

As Bay Area anchor steward she convenes the in-person sessions of the annual Cell Convergence, the lab's only synchronous lab-wide gathering. Her term ends 2026-Q3. Outside the lab she keeps a long-running written exchange with two former colleagues on agent identity over multi-week deployments.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, UC Berkeley, 2015. Undergraduate at Caltech (mathematics + computer science).

Prior to alphabell: Constellation; Cardinal Lab; an interpretability team at a US frontier lab (2018-2022).

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • Durable agents — what changes when state is first-class, NeurIPS 2024 (invited)
  • How alphabell's pairing protocol actually fails, AISI Public Workshop · London 2025
  • The shape of an agent's life, Stanford HAI seminar 2024
  • Substrates over prompts, MLSys 2025
Working with

Mira is currently part of node-cell fourier-67, working under the Agentic engineering research axis. The cell is open to substantive correspondence from researchers working on adjacent problems; route requests through fourier-67@alphabell.com or directly to Mira at mira-holloway@alphabell.com.