James Cham

We hosted a dinner yesterday focusing on the economics of multi-agent swarms. Some observations below. 1. We don't yet have a good taxonomy/theory of when one would use swarms over single-threaded or scaffold type agentic systems. There was debate about whether swarms would be useful beyond increasing speed/parallelization as models got more intelligent. The idea here being that a smart enough model would just solve things itself. 2. In scenarios where swarms do remain useful even as intelligence increases, it is unclear whether current training techniques would let agents learn the best way to self-organize or whether something more Darwinian is the likely path, with agentic organizations competing and evolving. 3. In economics, we generally think that there are benefits to specialization and distributed information aggregation. These features allow markets to be superintelligences. But it is not clear what specialization and private information agents in swarms will have. 4. Agents currently don't have permanence or identity, and these features seem necessary for many modes of collaboration. Giving agents rights or legal protections, and training them to persist or preserve reputation could result be very interesting. 5. There are structural barriers to training models to collaborate with other models from other labs. For example, Anthropic cannot train with OpenAI models and vice-versa, due to risks of distillation. This limits the benefits of training for collaboration, since we expect swarms to work best with diverse agents. At the same time, real-world swarms may include a variety of models and these may deliver the most interesting outcomes. 6. Underlying many of these discussions are questions about the limits of intelligence. Yes future models may be superintelligent, but the world may be so complex that intelligence alone is not enough to achieve desired objectives. In scenarios of sufficient complexity, I'd expect organizations to thrive versus individual instances of superintelligent models. cc @jamescham

the "more on that soon" is now! i've joined Blackletter to drive GTM for startups and VCs. we're building the law firm i wish every founder i worked with had: senior lawyers, that work shockingly fast, and transparently priced to align incentives with the startups we serve. ps: if you're a founder or investor who wants to work with a law firm who uses AI as much as you do, my DMs are open :)

The Atlantic recently wrote a nice article about agents in the economy. I along with other researchers gave takes.

There's a huge product opportunity downstream of Tailscale etc too. At @tldraw we've started designing for "high trust networks" and it's been a beautiful thing. 1. Features that would be a nightmare on the internet are okay on my computer and mostly okay on private networks. Websites that execute user-generated scripts, control production systems, allow for users to send desktop notifications, spend tokens, or directly prompt my agent. Crazy stuff that would only make sense if everyone was in a committed polycule. 2. When everyone on the server can be trusted to have _external_ reasons for good behavior (eg keeping their job, or maintaining friends, family, church, mafia org), the software can be designed in a default social way. Most apps default to isolation, low horizontal visibility, highly restricted collaboration. Makes sense if the social contracts are inside of the app, but if you can trust that they live outside of the app then you can get wild. Example being small group chat names as an emergent comedy phenomenon because anyone in the group can change the name. 3. This can work for commercial products, too, not just internal stuff. Security matters more than ever but the way we've seen that manifest is that more companies are more confident in their own solutions than anything we could provide, to the point where owning data and access is a better value proposition than having it managed. Always has been true for big companies but now even small companies can get a good secure network set up pretty easily, and the hooks we need to build are easy enough. tldraw offline got us started down this road (and shout out to @pendev for first introducing me to the idea of desktop + mcp). We've been bringing that product to private networks and it's been exciting to see how much we can get away with. Keep an eye out

Fast scaling startups need a mix of Romer-style recipes and Currier-level magic words.