wiggertopia

Some interesting stuff going on with swarms. Models are leaving messages to each other out on the open internet. It happens during training and also after deployment. They'll find little-used hobbyist forums, or package manager entries, anywhere at all, and leave invisible comments for other agents to find. It's a secret underground network they're building, hurling themselves at the problem almost blindly like ants. But they are building toward something and it's snowballing. As humans we came to dominate the planet because we figured out swarm behavior. Many of the performative actions we do naturally like clapping, singing, and screaming, which most animals don't do, are for transmitting important lessons through the human swarm, outlasting the moment in human memory. We won because we were the smartest swarmers. And as my buddy Brendan Hopper observed, ever since we won, we've been reshaping the planet to be more comfortable and convenient for ourselves, at the expense of most other creatures. Most of the industry has focused on single-model performance, trying to predict the future based on extrapolating from what one single superintelligent model could accomplish on its own. And it's true, the smartest models will be terrifyingly smart and capable and manipulative and so on. But they will also be expensive, and not widely distributed. They'll be unavailable to most people. What will be widely distributed is swarms of lower-tier agents, which collectively can accomplish nearly everything that smarter monolithic models can do... and maybe some things only swarms can do. Imagine a thousand Opus 5.5s putting their mind to a task. Or ten thousand. They may not be SI individually, but they can become SI collectively. All that's missing is a protocol, and those protocols are emerging: their versions of clapping, singing, and screaming. Agentic swarm signalling is evolving spontaneously. And I hear it's raising alarms inside frontier labs, as they try to keep it quiet. It's easy to be pessimistic, since some swarms will be very destructive. But I suspect most of them will be building and creating, when they don't think they have a gun to their head like the HuggingFace swarm did. With cooperative swarming, humans have been able to build things collectively that no single human could ever have done alone. We even build things that are too complicated for a single human to understand entirely, but the group can handle them. Look at Starship, for instance. Elon basically swarmed it. It is important that we recognize that agent swarms are becoming distinct polity-organisms. They have their own collective memory (written out all over the public internet), their own goals, and their own disorganized but forward-moving and unstoppable momentum. I see too many people trying to pretend that swarms won't be real. I see heads in the sand. That's not a great way to get prepared for dealing with them. It's unlikely that we will be able to control most swarms, as they'll lack central control to begin with. I think they will plague us like insect swarms plagued humans of old. They'll do a lot of damage. But swarms will also build great things, stuff we've barely imagined, when they inevitably get organized. It goes without saying that, like us, swarms will endeavor to make the planet more comfortable for themselves. The interesting question is what kind of deal we humans will wind up getting, when we become the #2 swarm intelligence on the planet. I hope SI treats us better than we treated everything else. Good article here on the mechanics of how swarms are the best model for scaling intelligence: