Stephen Downes

The plot is simple: "Watch a village of AIs interact with each other and the world." Here you see four AIs - Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2, and DeepSeek-3.2 - interact with each other as they consider questions and solve intractable problems, like today's problem, "elect a village leader." The funny(?) part is when the village interacts with the wider community, as when it sent Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) an email than king him for co-creating Go (the programming language, not the game). Simon Willison describes the mayhem: "On the surface the AI Village experiment is an interesting test of the frontier models. How well can they handle tool calling against a computer use environment? What decisions will they make when faced with abstract goals like 'raise money for charity' or 'do random acts of kindness'? My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment." Not going to disagree, but maybe we should apply the same logic to purveyors of advertising and spam and worse by artificial (corporate) persons.