Orchestrating Networks

Could AGI come about not as a single model, but instead emerge from a massive networks of applications and AI systems across the internet, similar to how life emerged from many large networks of complicated metabolical and chemical processes?

I think, AGI is unlikely to arrive as a single machine learning model waking up one day. It is more likely to arrive the way life did — as an ecology of processes that, together, cross some threshold where the whole begins to maintain, correct, and extend itself independent from any of its parts.

Similar to how no single chemical reaction is alive, no single API call is intelligent. But move up, and the molecules that make up cells form complicated metabolical cycles, these metabolic cycles form networks of even more complicated processes, which result in the formation of increasingly larger and more complex molecules, that are part of even more complicated processes. Eventually combining together into organelles, protocells, and eventually individual cells.

This is the part our intuitions struggle with. We expect intelligence to live somewhere. In a model. In a chip. In a head. But life does not live in any single molecule. The right scale to look at machine intelligence may not be any individual model or application, or agent at all. More likely I think AGO will emerge in the future from an enormous tower of relatively inefficient vibe-coded AI generated processes and agents that are constantly rewriting each other. So that similar to life, AGI consists of patterns of information that learn to sustain themselves, and are able to generate new knowledge, rather than only following existing patterns within our language.

If that framing is right, the question "when will AGI arrive?" is nearly as confused as the question "when did life arrive?" Life did not arrive. Chemistry slowly stopped being only chemistry. We may already be living inside a world in which early AGI like entities are roaming around on the internet in their simplest and earliest forms.