Agentarium: Creating social simulations with AI Agents
github.com
github.com
I’ve found myself more entertained by far simpler AI using complex behavior trees or utility AI mechanics. Their emergent behaviors are just as good at creating stories in my head for what is happening in their world, even if the characters don’t engage in actual conversation. It seems the ability for chatbots to speak text naturally with each other is of little value unless you like to eavesdrop every single conversation in every interaction two characters have. You could accomplish the same results by just passing raw numeric values between two bots that ultimately change their internal mental states.
(if I can make it realistic enough lol)
If the answer you seek can be observed by watching LLMs interact at scale, then the answer is already within the LLM model in the first place.
My first thought would be that it's kinda we, humans, behave. It feels a bit the equivalent of the mom-test. If you ask someone "do you like this", he/she is bias to to say "yes", same goes for LLMs (I took a dummy example but you got the idea).
Anyway, I can be wrong, I can be right, ATM no one knows not even me
is the new
"AI" -> LLM
(this being the only sensible terminology definition I’ve seen for which has very definitely been a “fund my startup” marketing term until now: https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents)
While all "Agentic" system will likely use some form of function calling, not all function calling is "Agentic". Most implementations are more "Workflows" than "Agents".
stafford beer on cybernetics (also worth mention, norbert weiner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg
Lots of other people start w/ other things but i'm a mgmt minded person so a social engineering + psychology + anthropology oriented lens has always been my anchor.
My first real intro to math where everything clicked was w/ primitive graph theory as it were 2000+ years ago. From there, algebra, geometry, trig, calc, etc# started clicking.
Once you start examining scenarios where there are multiple clones of you that you perhaps cannot tell apart, your memory has been limited, you are facing larger amounts of pain & pleasure that you can handle without going insane, everyone wants the same thing but you also want something different, or someone gets mind-reading powers that might be partial and only work when they reveal their thoughts... then you are analytically working towards the end goal of building a larger catalogue of "everything" & making a theory & terminology out of that.
I would dedicate 2-20 years on the formal work but there's no funding I could get I know of & besides couldn't promise to yield results since foundations yields no results until it does if it ever does.
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A related note: Kolmogorov complexity & finitism go along beautifully but the bit-lifting to calculate memory computational process takes insofar is out of my capacity. Nevertheless you can define a maximum number to ever allowed to exist in a system as Church number & have then perhaps the minimum amount of logical operations required to get there to be the maximum amount of memory your operations can take, closing the system since you lose memory in say substraction to a, b, the process initial size (hello, Kolmogorov) & process memory consumed at most (in any procedure, the smallest procedure being the number itself).
Currently it's up to the user to add its own actions, you can find an example where I gave the agents access to ChatGPT (cf link)
Obviously, some default actions will be added in the future :D
link to example: https://github.com/Thytu/Agentarium/blob/main/examples/3_add...
As most people understand them, a lot of marketing and imagination. There's some fairly dense theory on the underlying concept that is probably inaccessible to someone without a math degree, and much of this research happened well after my academic days so I cannot comment on a deep level, but I'm extremely skeptical of its attempted implementation in the current market, particularly when language models are at the core of it. From what I understand, an agentic system can exist entirely without LLM's and all the rube-goldberg machinations behind giving it the appearance of working. However, this is the course that every single tech company has gone all in on, so we'll see how it goes. I suspect that LLM's will be discarded in favor of something much better in the mid to far future, but the fact that no one can currently say what that is or even would look like is a little bit concerning to me when the large bets are being made that it will just happen inevitably in more near-future timelines.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
The big thing that you want though is diversity in terms of each of the AI's, and I'm not convinced that altering temperature / system context prompt / optional backing RAG represents sufficient variety from virtual bot to virtual bot.
Ideally, you would want to throw as many different LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Qwen, etc.) into the mix as possible, but hardware constraints make this borderline impossible.
I really want to play with these, I just don't have the tokens. I do have a decent graphics card though.
aisuite : https://github.com/andrewyng/aisuite
Some background: For my PhD thesis, about 8 years ago, did I simulate how voice agents can influence humans. I did that with an agent based simulations. Before I did the simulation I gathered actually influence values by doing experiments with human participants.
The limitations however were, I only had basically one dimensions of influence.
With LLM, we can create all sort of actors. And play scenarios, like introducing a new legislation and see how different types of the population will react.