Live data from Hacker News

Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

github.com

141–150 of 173 posts

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: "learnings". https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/learn... "knowledge or a piece of information obtained by study or experience" "I am already incorporating some of these learnings into my work and getting better results."

That example was added in 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20190903044149/https://dictionar... You can clearly see that the prior use was very different. Cambridge Dictionary just documents that it's in fact used that way. One may still disagree on whether it should be. "That's not English" is usually prescriptive, rather than descriptive. And though English does not have a central authority, individuals are very mu…

> individuals are very much allowed to hold prescriptive beliefs - that is how language evolves.

I think, actually, it's the case that language evolves around those people who are too stubbornly prescriptivist.

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#142

Now these seem to be truly artificially intelligent agents. Memory, volition, autonomy, something like an OODA loop or whatever you want to call it, and a persistent environment. Very nice concept, and I'm positive the learnings can be applied to more mundane business problems, too. If only I could get management to understand that a bunch of prompts shitting into eachother isn't "cutting-edge agentic AI"... But then…

Just so you know, the English noun for things that have been learned is, "lessons."

I'm an old man and have heard "learnings" used to mean "lessons" for most of my life.

I think "learnings" has advantages over "lessons" given that "learnings" has one meaning, while "lessons" can have more than one meaning.

Whether it's correct or not, are we surprised it's used this way? Consider the word "earnings" and how similar its definition is to "learnings."

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#144
post #21

This seems very cool - I am sceptical of the supposed benefits for "civilization" but it could at least make for some very interesting sim games. (So maybe it will be good for Civilization moreso than civilization.)

Yeah, I was dissapointed (and thrilled, from a p(doom) perspective) to see it implemented in Minecraft instead of Civilization VI, Humankind, or any of the main Paradox grand strategies (namely Stellaris, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and Europa Universalis). To say the least, the stakes are higher and more realistic than "lets plan a feast" "ok, I'll gather some wood!" To be fair, they might tackle this in the paper --…

I suspect that Minecraft might have the open source possibilities (or at least programming interfaces ?) that the other games you listed lack ?

For Civilizations, the more recent they are, the more closed off they tend to be : Civ 1 and/or 2 have basically been remade from scratch as open source, Civ 4 has most of the game open sourced in the two tiers of C++ and Python... but AFAIK Civ 5 (and also 6 ?) were large regressions in modding capabilities compared to 4 ?

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#145
post #107
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If only I could get management to understand that a bunch of prompts shitting into eachother isn't "cutting-edge agentic AI"... It should never be this way. Even with narrow AI, there needs to be a governance framework that helps measure the output and capture potential risks (hallucinations, wrong data / links, wrong summaries, etc)

Do you have any resources on that topic? I’d be interested.

On narrow AI or generative AI Risk Management?

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#146
post #70

I feel like there is some kind of information theory constraint which confounds our ability to extract higher order behavior from multiple instances of the same LLM. I spent quite a bit of time building a multi agent simulation last year and wound up at the same conclusion every day - this is all just a roundabout form of prompt engineering. Perhaps it is useful as a mental model, but you can flatten the whole thing…

I wrote and played with a fairly simple agentic system and had some of the same thoughts RE higher order behaviour. But I think the counter-points would be that they don't have to all be the same model, and what you might call context management - keeping each agent's "chain of thought" focused and narrow.

The former is basically what MoE is all about, and I've found that at least with smaller models they perform much better with a restricted scope and limited context. If the end result of that is something that do things a single large model can't, isn't that higher order?

You're right that there's no "inner world" but then maybe that's the benefit of giving them one. In the same way that providing a code-running tool to an LLM can allow it to write better code (by trying it out) I can imagine a 3D world being a playground for LLMs to figure out real-world problems in a way they couldn't otherwise. If they did that wouldn't it be higher order?

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, the English noun for things that have been learned is, "lessons."

Yup, and "ask" is a verb, God damn it, not a noun. But people in the tech world frequently use "learnings" instead of "lessons," "ask" as a noun, "like" as filler, and "downfall" when they mean "downside." Best to make your peace and move on with life. Just FYI: that second comma is incorrect.

'Gift' vs 'give' also rustles my jimmies. The phrase 'he gifted it to her' doesn't mean anything different from 'he gave it to her'. As a Calvinite, my stance is that 'verbing weirds language'.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and "ask" is a verb, God damn it, not a noun. But people in the tech world frequently use "learnings" instead of "lessons," "ask" as a noun, "like" as filler, and "downfall" when they mean "downside." Best to make your peace and move on with life. Just FYI: that second comma is incorrect.

'Gift' vs 'give' also rustles my jimmies. The phrase 'he gifted it to her' doesn't mean anything different from 'he gave it to her'. As a Calvinite, my stance is that 'verbing weirds language'. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Ew, likewise. I'd even go so far as to say that "verbing" this way is "impactful," and not in a good way. "Going forward," we should all try to use language more thoughtfully.

The C&H strip is wonderful. That whole comic strip is brilliant and timeless.

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption I wonder, once LLM's exceed Humans beyond some substantial threshold, will it crack the simulation allowing us to get back in the game again.

Crack what simulation exactly? You can get back into the game right now, armed with these tools such as LLMs, ML and so on.

Culture, memetics, consciousness, etc.

Indeed, but simply using them is not enough.

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#150

I've reviewed the paper and I'm confident this paper was fabricated over a collection of false claims. The claims made are not genuine and should not be taken at face value without peer review. The provided charts and graphics are sophisticated forgeries in many cases when reviewing and vetting their applicability to the claims made. It is currently not possible for any kind of LLM to do what is being proposed, while…

For others, it's probably worth pointing that this person's account is about a day old and they have left no contact information for the author's of the paper to follow up with them on.

For "caetris2" I'll just use the same level of rigor and authenticity that you used in your comment when I say "you're full-of-shit/jealous and clearly misunderstood large portions of this paper".

Post reply on HN