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Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025
AI Agents, Modularity, and Alignment
Let’s explore how Minsky’s insights on modularity, agent-like architectures, and internal oversight map onto current developments: from Mixture-of-Experts models and multi-agent systems (HuggingGPT, AutoGen) to new approaches in AI alignment and debates over centralized vs. decentralized designs. Giant all-in-one models can be astonishingly clever in some respects, yet surprisingly brittle in others: they can still get confused by multi-step reasoning, struggle with long-horizon planning, hallucinate false information with supreme confidence, and lack any built-in mechanism to check or justify their own outputs. We are, in essence, building societies of mind in our software: whether it’s an ensemble of expert models routed by a gating network, a swarm of autonomous agents collaborating on a task, or a single chatbot augmented with an inner voice of reason checking its work.
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