Blaise Agüera y Arcas
speaker
213 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Examples of some of the more heady problems that we're looking at now are not just how individual intelligent agents work, but how multiple agents in interactions with each other lead to larger collective intelligences.
And even how, when you look at what we think of as single models, they look internally like societies of sub-agents.
We think of this as the social intelligence hypothesis, meaning that intelligence is inherently social
whether you think about it at the scale of societies or even at the scale of brains.
Yes.
So we can definitely, and we do do those sorts of experiments where we take agents and we put them in societies or institutions or conversational structures with each other.
And you can ask questions like if they all
are set up to agree with each other versus set up to be misaligned with each other, to disagree with each other, which of those kinds of setups leads to better problem solving of the collective.
And it turns out there that it's better if you have them disagreeing with each other than if they're all preaching to the choir, as it were.
But then you can also ask the same question of an individual model.
And this is a little bit mind-bending, but if you look at the chain of thought, which is to say the inner monologue of an individual reasoning model, then one of the things you find in there is that there are actually voices or characters that have been developed that do exactly the same thing inside those models.
It's like the model is talking to itself, arguing with itself, kind of like Gollum versus Smeagol in Lord of the Rings or something, but often with more characters.
And you get that behavior just from training reasoning models to do a good job of reasoning.
So I think that there is a really profound lesson in this, and it's a practical one in terms of how to build AI models, but it's also a philosophical one in the sense that it suggests that intelligence is fundamentally social, both at the scale of brains and societies.
Well, that is the place where I think a lot of folk psychology and philosophy also goes wrong in assuming that there is
a homunculus, you know, that there's a mini Steve, you know, and a mini Blaze, you know, inside our brains.
When in fact, what you are is that collection of voices.
I'm really excited to hear that that's how you think of yourself, how you model yourself internally.
It's how I think of myself too.
But many people think of themselves as being very unified, as having just one
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