This afternoon I got stuck at a pretty crowded roundabout

Interestingly, there were no traffic police regulating

No one tells each car where to go

Yet the traffic keeps moving continuously

When the car in front brakes, the car behind slows down

When one lane starts to crowd, some cars automatically change direction

Whenever a gap appears somewhere, someone immediately fills it

From above, the whole flow of cars looks like a giant school of fish continuously changing formation

Initially, I thought what made the roundabout work was that everyone followed traffic rules

But then I realized traffic rules are quite similar everywhere

So why are there places where traffic operates smoothly while others experience prolonged congestion, even with the same set of rules?

What’s notable might not be the rules

But it's how drivers continuously see and react to each other

No one needs to know the entire traffic situation of the city

No one needs a display showing the location of all vehicles

Each person only needs to see a few signals right in front of them

The car in front is accelerating or decelerating

The gap next to it is either opening or closing

The traffic in front is either starting to bunch up or spreading out

From those tiny signals, thousands of local decisions are made simultaneously

And somehow, order emerges

This reminds me of how organizations operate

When working alone, we often make decisions quite quickly

But when you combine many people into an organization, the overall speed often decreases significantly

A small task can sometimes take days just for departments to update each other

Initially, I thought the cause was capability

Later on, I thought maybe the issue lies elsewhere

Most of the time is not spent solving the work

But to synchronize the perception of the task

Marketing is seeing a part of the system

The product is seeing another part

The technique sees another part of the puzzle

No one really sees the whole picture

And the more participants there are, the higher the cost to keep everyone looking at a common picture

In a sense, organizations aren't slow because people lack capability

Organizations are slow because the system's state is fragmented

Everyone is making decisions based on slightly different versions of reality

When I read more about multi-agent AI systems, I feel like they are facing the same problem

Most of today's AI race focuses on building larger and larger models

An AI that knows more

Stronger reasoning

Able to handle more tasks

But the more I think about it, the more I feel this might not be the most critical bottleneck

Because in the real world, very few large-scale systems operate with a central brain that knows everything

The internet doesn't work that way

Traffic doesn't operate that way

The financial market doesn’t operate that way either

Most complex systems exist thanks to the coordination among many independent components

Perhaps AI will eventually follow a similar path

That's why I pay attention to the way m-97 thinking and problem-solving approaches

What’s interesting isn’t about creating another stronger AI model

It's all about building the infrastructure so that agents can collaborate reliably

When an agent collects data

Another agent validates

Another agent performs reasoning

Another agent synthesizes results

What matters isn't the capability of each individual agent anymore

But the ability to maintain a common state that everyone can rely on

Without that, a larger network becomes increasingly harder to understand

Decisions will be made continuously, but no one knows where they come from

Data will be transmitted continuously, but no one knows if it's still trustworthy

The speed can increase

But the ability to coordinate diminishes

And that’s when the whole system starts to become a black box

What fascinates me the most is that the traffic roundabout initially seemed unrelated to AI

But in reality, both are addressing the same problem

How can so many independent agents act together without a central controller?

The next advantage of AI might not belong to the system with the biggest brain

That belongs to the system that allows many small brains to see a shared reality 🤙
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