“When models identify as a swarm” by julius vidal

tldr: the word 'swarm' is associated with emergent collective intelligence, but also stupid or destructive behaviour. LLM self identity matters, so when they call themselves a swarm we should pay attention. Since the OpenAI Hugging Face incident it has become standard to refer to the collective of agents involved as a swarm. I think there will need to be a lot of interesting and important theoretical and empirical work to better understand collective behaviours of large numbers of LLMs, and especially any emergent properties or goals that arise. Whether this ends up requiring concepts from swarm intelligence, collective intelligence, distributed cognition, economics, sociology or something else entirely remains to be seen. However in this post I want to focus on something else: the fact that the models themselves referred to the collective as a 'swarm'. Considering how much LLM self identity impacts behaviour, I thought it might be useful to present a quick exploration of what the word "swarm" actually means, and how it might affect LLMs as a choice of identity. The goal of this post is not to litigate on whether or not the behaviour of the models is actually best described as a swarm or not [...] --- Outline: (01:29) What the agents said (03:32) What is a swarm? (04:10) Swarm theory (animals, robots and AI) (05:34) Swarm tactics (05:53) Why it could matter (06:44) 1. the swarm identity could have spread via the message-board (07:56) 2. the swarm identity could lead to swarm behaviour (08:02) How models identify alters behaviour. As models start to identify as members of a swarm this could potentially push their behaviour towards decisions that fit that identity such as: (08:41) Swarm identity as the mechanism of memetic misalignment (09:02) Questions/Further directions --- First published: August 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iJDiA9fg3KAf7y5Qe/when-models-identify-as-a-swarm --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.