Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#71

Post by cyanydeez »

cheema33 wrote: post #68
narmiouh wrote: post #65

The most interesting part to me is the "Group accuracy by Model" section, because it underscores that a single agent having all the relevant information consistently scores significantly higher than a group of agents with parts of the information. Is it fair to then infer that when decisions are to be made, single agent environments are going to make them better than multi-agent if the relevant information can fit in…

> Is it fair to then infer that when decisions are to be made, single agent environments are going to make them better than multi-agent if the relevant information can fit into a single agents context window? Context window for most frontier models is 1 million tokens. They all start to lose their minds around 300K, if not sooner.

they all operate on the same assumption, that a single token has a single meaning and that meaning doesn't change as more information is added. So regardless of size, context poisoning is a near certainty approaching 1 as the context grows. Few tasks are so clinical that they include zero ambiguity in the context chain.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#72

Post by alberto467 »

cheesecakegood wrote: post #34

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…

Wouldn’t it be better with different models working together? To me it feels intuitive that this type of degradation would be avoided with different models.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#73

Post by StilesCrisis »

alexpotato wrote: post #67
dgellow wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#74

Post by cyanydeez »

aabhay wrote: post #8

It’s very clear from this article (and other product features and rumors) that Anthropic is teeing up for their next model release whose breakthrough feature will be the existence of capable agent collaboration. The irony behind this goal, which is primarily driven by agent simulation environments (gyms) where the goals require agent collaboration, is that this collaboration is still directed towards verifiable rewar…

So they're mostly turning agents into blind solidiers. surely this is a good idea.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#75

Post by cyanydeez »

skeltoac wrote: post #11

> Coordination doesn’t naturally emerge from stronger intelligence nor alignment at the individual level. Thus, the work that must be done takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. Social pressure operates by threats to an individual’s means of survival. Not only durin…

oh, look, someone found a cute lobster in a bucket. should we free him guys or let him live in his dystopian metal can.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#76

Post by naveen99 »

rob74 wrote: post #57

> Some institutions will become human-AI hybrids; others where agents outcompete on speed or cost will become agent-only. The scary thing about articles from AI companies is how they casually mention dystopian scenarios such as this one. An institution humans have to interact with that doesn't have any human oversight? Sounds like a recipe for disaster...

Like the weather ?

The only thing that matters is if it’s self sustaining.

If it can make money and pay taxes, I don’t think any government will ban it. And it would easily become undetectable anyway.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#77

Post by cryptolobster »

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 on the fly. For example fine-tune themselves after each interaction. Perhaps then we wouldn't need to build entire networks of agent interactions. But this of course is not so easy to implement.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#78

Post by orbital-decay »

cryptolobster wrote: post #77

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.

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#79

Post by [deleted] »

aabhay wrote: post #8

It’s very clear from this article (and other product features and rumors) that Anthropic is teeing up for their next model release whose breakthrough feature will be the existence of capable agent collaboration. The irony behind this goal, which is primarily driven by agent simulation environments (gyms) where the goals require agent collaboration, is that this collaboration is still directed towards verifiable rewar…

[deleted]

Re: Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

#80

Post by voidhorse »

dmd wrote: post #61
rpastuszak wrote: post #60

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]

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 actual computer scientists developed precise language around what they were actually doing instead.

We should be critical and use language appropriately and try to describe things correctly. LLMs do not have plastic brain like humans do, which already fundamentally changes what "self awareness" can means for them. There's also the small problem of LLMs not really having an identity beyond the stateless computation that is a chat session which is just some computer code executed on a server. lol

Post reply on HN