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Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

anthropic.com

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Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't the LLMs build scripts/tools etc that help generate creative ideas? e.g. have the LLM generate multiple lists of characters, themes etc and then have a script hooked up to a RNG pick from the lists to create more "creative" ideas.

That's pretty low-value creativity. Real innovation doesn't come from mad libs.

I would highly recommend the "Everything is a Remix" series on YouTube to show how a lot of "creative" work is really just combining different items.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a new physics break through gets published today, no existing model will be able to fully integrate it - beyond a context window. If I put the paper in my session and it isnt in yours the model knows nothing. It wont retain it past that session. Models are trained, they do not learn.

I think GP is using a different level of abstraction from yours in their metaphor. You are saying: Pre-Training == Everything you store in your memory throughout your life. Model weights == The lessons you learned Context == whatever you're currently thinking about One inference run == one thought They are saying: Pre-Training == building the DNA template of human brain through millions of years evolution. Model weig…

The ladder in humans is even longer and wider than that, it's roughly: evolutionary pretraining of a complex molecular robot -> generational knowledge transfer and compression by the "parallelized agentic swarm" aka society -> individual lifetime learning due to neuroplasticity -> immediate attention (extremely narrow and volatile). Note how the individual is just one half of it.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#93

Something about this is deeply funny to me: > In an iterated prisoner's dilemma game with communication, agents all settle upon the same strategy and they all defect at the same time, tanking their overall rewards. It’s not always consistent, but humans have a higher capability of self-awareness. It’s kind of telling that these Claudes don’t seem to consider this pretty obvious failure mode. Overall I think this all…

I agree - I think one of the biggest reasons memory systems fail in LLMs is that they have poor theory of mind - they're terrible at considering how others will react. Both humans yes, but also future versions of itself. When asked to give advice to itself, it pontificates at length about trivial stuff it already knows and fails to emphasize the stuff that was new or interesting

Alfred North Whitehead talks about the notion of "Importance" as fundamental to the human (and all other living things) way of being. Living creatures first and foremost select information that is important to them from the broader environment, and then make decisions and take actions. (Of course at a physiological level it's much more complicated than this, but it's a sound philosophical description of how living things work.) LLMs lack this entirely. They have no selective filter because they weren't designed to have one (interesting question if you could even do that) and they're not evolved beings with a survival imperative. When they enter a self-conscious or other-conscious mode like you're describing, they just emit text that looks like the thoughts of a self-or-other-conscious person. They can't direct a stream of attention or hold a concept in the forefront relative to other concepts or (to your main point) think about what matters to the other person/being because they don't experience "matters." All they can do is emulate the verbal output of beings that actually experience these things, and given that I don't find it surprising they get trapped in loops over trivial things.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#94
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not always consistent, but humans have a higher capability of self-awareness. It’s kind of telling that these Claudes don’t seem to consider this pretty obvious failure mode. We need better words to describe this than "self-awareness" or "consider". These words mean fundamentally different things when speaking about humans or clankers.

[flagged]

It is tiring to write it as well! But, people make real decisions based on unrealistic expectations that LLMs would act like humans.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#95

Honestly I think it's memory that's holding agents back. They have a context window (short-lived) and some tricks with file recording, but that's not quite what is needed. Agents can't look back and correct their mistakes. People make mistakes, remember them, and do better next time. But agents? If they haven't written them down somewhere they'll make the same mistake again. Perhaps, we need agents that can relearn o…

Learning/state compression can emerge naturally in a huge swarm like this. It's crude and inefficient but so is everything about current LLM tech.

Absurd generalizations like this usually require a citation of some kind to be taken seriously.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#96
> The conditions that allow multiagent interaction to go well will be discovered one way or another: either deliberately and early, or—and by default—in production, after agents’ interactions far outnumber ours. We would prefer the former.

My master's research focuses on coordination among LLM-based agents, driven by the same motivations as the article.

One phenomenon I have focused on, though it did not appear in this specific work, is bounded rationality. Yes, agents lack social perception, they focus on one-to-one tasks and are trained in game theory and other maximization strategies. Yet, what intrigues me most is that we humans rely on heuristics precisely because our capacity to maximize gains is severely limited, a limitation that gives rise to social emergent phenomenas. As models become increasingly capable of complex reasoning, the question arises: will interactions between them give rise to the same social properties we exhibit?

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning/state compression can emerge naturally in a huge swarm like this. It's crude and inefficient but so is everything about current LLM tech.

Absurd generalizations like this usually require a citation of some kind to be taken seriously.

The article is literally talking about swarm self-coordination, which is an emergent [1] property that preserves and compresses the state while running, otherwise it couldn't do what they claim it to do.

[1] After a training-time nudge, of course.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#98
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Why? Unjustified linguistic analogy is a huge part of AI companies success. If we want to actually understand how LLMs work and differ in their operation from humans we need to develop appropriate language, not latch onto some totally unproven equivalence that makes Dario's eyes water with all the free boosting we are doing for him. Lay people might talk about traditional computers "thinking" but there's a reason act…

> Lay people might talk about traditional computers "thinking" but there's a reason actual computer scientists developed precise language around what they were actually doing instead. > not latch onto some totally unproven equivalence

Precisely. This is akin to my dad, back in 1995, telling me to stop moving the mouse cursor in MS Paint because the computer was "thinking" (he heard the HDD buzzing). That I can understand.

But surely we can expect more from people here than from a carpenter in a tiny mountain village who bought his son a computer in the 90s. (The second one in town!)

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#99

Something about this is deeply funny to me: > In an iterated prisoner's dilemma game with communication, agents all settle upon the same strategy and they all defect at the same time, tanking their overall rewards. It’s not always consistent, but humans have a higher capability of self-awareness. It’s kind of telling that these Claudes don’t seem to consider this pretty obvious failure mode. Overall I think this all…

Another (semi serious) possible explanation of this is that LLMs were trained on a huge volume of text from Reddit. I wonder if you'd see similar inhuman-looking behavior if you did an iterated prisoners dilemma with a group of Reddit power-users as the participants?

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#100
post #63

Something about this is deeply funny to me: > In an iterated prisoner's dilemma game with communication, agents all settle upon the same strategy and they all defect at the same time, tanking their overall rewards. It’s not always consistent, but humans have a higher capability of self-awareness. It’s kind of telling that these Claudes don’t seem to consider this pretty obvious failure mode. Overall I think this all…

In VC investing there is the saying that most of the value comes from the outliers. I think it’s the same for a lot of domains. I read an interesting article recently on LLMs homogeneity when writing fiction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03136 It seem that at scale LLMs output is the average of their dataset, they all cluster around the same space, where human creativity comes with more variance, exploring way more of…

All the LLM needs is a tiny rate of variance then you can scale it and it will out produce humans.
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