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Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

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

#61

Post by ramraj07 »

iamthejuan wrote: post #58

Simulate selfishness because that is the main reason why there are problems in the world.

Selfishness is the main reason life exists in the universe. Literally the only requirement for a lump of stuff to become alive is to become selfish. So you’re semi right that these LLMs can never become truly sentient unless they actually become selfish.

While selfishness is a basic requirement, some stupidity (imo) is also important for intelligent life. If you as an AI agent don’t have some level of stupidity, you’ll instantly see that there’s no point to doing anything and just switch yourself off.

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

#62

Post by ytss »

whatshisface wrote: post #57
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

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 believe that “learnings” is also a word that could be applied in this context.

It seems to me “learnings” would actually be less ambiguous than “lessons”. A lesson brings to mind a thing being taught, not just learned.

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

#63

Post by flashman »

I think their top-down approach is a problem. What they call human civilization wasn't and isn't centrally-planned, and its goals and ideologies are neither universal nor implicit. The integration of software agents (I refuse to call them "AI") into civilization won't occur in a de facto cooperative framework where such agents are permitted to fraternize and self-modify. Perhaps that will happen in walled gardens where general-purpose automatons can collectively 'plan' activities to maximize efficiency, but in our broader human world, any such collaboration is going to have to occur from the bottom-up and for the initial benefit of the agents' owners.

This kind of research needs to take place in an adversarial environment. There might be something interesting to learn from studying the (lack of?) emergence of collaboration there.

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

#64

Post by bbor »

ytss wrote: post #62
whatshisface wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe that “learnings” is also a word that could be applied in this context. It seems to me “learnings” would actually be less ambiguous than “lessons”. A lesson brings to mind a thing being taught, not just learned.

Let’s take this learning offline and circle back during the next sync, team

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

#65

Post by hackathonguy »

I'm curious if it might be possible that an AI "civilization", similar to the one proposed by Altera, could end up being a better paradigm for AGI than a single LLM, if a workable reward system for the entire civilization was put in place. Meaning, suppose this AI civilization was striving to maximize [scientific_output] or [code_quality] or any other eval, similar to how modern countries try to maximize GDP - would that provide better results than a single AI agent working towards that goal?

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

#66

Post by airstrike »

semanticc wrote: post #27
echelon wrote: post #4

All of their domains and branding are .aL I had no idea .aL was even a domain name. That's wild. I wonder how many of those are going to take off.

.al is just the TLD for Albania, similarly as .ai is for Anguilla. No idea why anyone would choose the former.

Agreed, it seems tangenti.al at best

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

#67

Post by bbor »

ramraj07 wrote: post #61
iamthejuan wrote: post #58

Simulate selfishness because that is the main reason why there are problems in the world.

Selfishness is the main reason life exists in the universe. Literally the only requirement for a lump of stuff to become alive is to become selfish. So you’re semi right that these LLMs can never become truly sentient unless they actually become selfish. While selfishness is a basic requirement, some stupidity (imo) is also important for intelligent life. If you as an AI agent don’t have some level of stupidity, you’…

The first point is absolutely correct, and (apologies in advance…) was a large driver of Nietzsche’s philosophy of evolution, most explicitly covered in The Gay Science. Not only “selfishness”, but the wider idea of particularized standpoints, each of which may stand in contradiction to the direct needs of the society/species in the moment. This is a large part of what he meant by his notoriously dumb-sounding quotes like “everything is permitted”; morality isn’t relative/nonexistent, it’s just evolving in a way that relies on immorality as a foil.

For the second part, I think that’s a good exposition of why “stupidity” and “intelligence” aren’t scientifically useful terms. I don’t think it’s necessarily “stupid” to prefer the continuation of yourself/your species, even if it doesn’t stand up to certain kinds of standpoint-specific intellectual inquiry. There’s lots of standpoints (dare I say most human ones) where life is preferable to non-life.

Regardless, my daily thesis is that LLMs are the first real Intuitive Algorithms, and thus the solution to the Frame Problem. In a certain colloquial sense, I’d say they’re absolutely already “stupid”, and this is where they draw their utility from. This is just a more general rephrasing of the common refrain that we’ve hopefully all learned by now: hallucinations are not a bug in LLMs, they’re a feature.

ETA: I, again, hate that I’m somehow this person now, but here’s a fantastic 2 hour YouTube video on the Nietzsche references above: https://youtu.be/fdtf53oEtWU?si=_bmgk9zycNBn2oCa

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

#68

Post by bbor »

hackathonguy wrote: post #65

I'm curious if it might be possible that an AI "civilization", similar to the one proposed by Altera, could end up being a better paradigm for AGI than a single LLM, if a workable reward system for the entire civilization was put in place. Meaning, suppose this AI civilization was striving to maximize [scientific_output] or [code_quality] or any other eval, similar to how modern countries try to maximize GDP - would…

Yes, good sense for progress! This has been a central design component of most serious AI work since the ~90s, most notably popularized by Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind. Highly, highly recommend for anyone with an interest in the mind and AI — it’s a series of one-page essays on different aspects of the thesis, which is a fascinating, Martin-Luther-esque format.

Of course this has been pushed to the side a bit in the rush towards shiny new pure-LLM approaches, but I think that’s more a function of a rapidly growing user base than of lost knowledge; the experts still keep this in mind, either in these terms or in terms of “Ensembles”. A great example is GPT-4, which AFAIU got its huge performance increase mostly through employing a “mixture of experts”, which is clearly a synonym for a society of agents or an ensemble of models.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

hackathonguy wrote: post #65

I'm curious if it might be possible that an AI "civilization", similar to the one proposed by Altera, could end up being a better paradigm for AGI than a single LLM, if a workable reward system for the entire civilization was put in place. Meaning, suppose this AI civilization was striving to maximize [scientific_output] or [code_quality] or any other eval, similar to how modern countries try to maximize GDP - would…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by bob1029 »

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 to a few SQL tables and functions. Each "agent" is essentially a sql view that maps a string template forming the prompt.

I don't think you need an actual 3D world, wall clock, etc. The LLM does not seem to be meaningfully enriched by having a fancy representation underly the prompt generation process. There is clearly no "inner world" in these LLMs, so trying to entertain them with a rich outer environment seems pointless.

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