Comment by grahamj

I wrote and played with a fairly simple agentic system and had some of the same thoughts RE higher order behaviour. But I think the counter-points would be that they don't have to all be the same model, and what you might call context management - keeping each agent's "chain of thought" focused and narrow.

The former is basically what MoE is all about, and I've found that at least with smaller models they perform much better with a restricted scope and limited context. If the end result of that is something that do things a single large model can't, isn't that higher order?

You're right that there's no "inner world" but then maybe that's the benefit of giving them one. In the same way that providing a code-running tool to an LLM can allow it to write better code (by trying it out) I can imagine a 3D world being a playground for LLMs to figure out real-world problems in a way they couldn't otherwise. If they did that wouldn't it be higher order?