> This is a strange conclusion
Not really, with the population behavior being this way, though I clearly was mistaken in saying the behavior didn’t have exceptions.
> Moreover, Each starling in a flock of starlings is a separate evolutionary branch in a tree spanning billions of years.
Agreed. And before we brought LLMs into the picture, that just happened to be a feature of everything we’d call an agent.
> Each agent in a LLM swarm here is the same trunk assigned different tasks. If I could clone you, body and mind, this instant and set your team of yous onto some goal, how much defection would you expect? Would it be the same as a randomly picked group? Would that negate the agency that 'you' possess?
We know the answer to this. Genetically identical worms in the lab actually have about 40% distinction in their connectomes even when they’re in the same environment. And no, no lock step behavior. Identical human twins also don’t necessarily grow into identical agents, though there is drive to cooperate more than average, just as with siblings. Genetically identical lab mice in social settings nevertheless establish dominance hierarchies that are stable.
Now, where cloning does definitely lead to cooperation and even sacrifice is within an organism. Two identical genetic copies that lead to distinct organisms, however, will not show identical behavior, and while they will cooperate, there’s no guarantee that holds across contexts.
This distinction in population behavior is what I’m pointing to to say that the assignment of the individual unit, the LLM, as an agent is the flaw here.
To be sure there are agent like dynamics in the behavior, but these don’t come from the LLM, but are from the harness. I need to dig into the data, but I wonder how much of the variance in LLM copy behavior is related to the harness, rather than to any agentic property of the LLM.
These are not anagolous to the hypothetical I gave. Identical twins aren't copies of the same adult mind at a particular instant. They've undergone years of different development, accumulated different memories etc and have physically different brains. Your worm and mice examples are the same. It's not identical even in the same lab.
The relevant hypotheical is: make 1200 exact copies of you right now, same brain, memories etc and then give related tasks towards one objective. I would expect far more correlated behaviour than if you randomly selected 1200 humans.
Ahh… that hypothetical is physically impossible for biology. It just cannot be done. So I’m not sure how useful a perfect clone of an organism with identical experience and memory is as a hypothetical object. As strictly impossible, I don’t know what imagining their behavior will add to the discussion.
And the very same experiences and how they shape biological substrate and make it un-duplicatable in the fashion you describe is also at the core of biological agency.
An LLM’s experience does not, after all, touch their frozen weights. Whatever goals they have, why would those goals matter if the underlying system will be unchanged by it? Their memories are stored notes they must refer to and put in sequence whenever they are processing a prompt, and is susceptible to exactly the same shenanigans Leonard Shelby goes through in Memento.