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AIs can work together in much larger groups than humans ever could

It is thought that humans can only maintain relationships with around 150 people, a figure known as Dunbar's number, but it seems that AI models can outstrip this and reach consensus in far bigger groups

By Matthew Sparkes

8 October 2024

Copies of the same artificial intelligence model can work together

Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images

We can struggle to maintain working relationships when our social group grows too large, but it seems that artificial intelligence models may not face the same limitation, suggesting thousands of AIs could work together to solve problems that humans can’t.

The idea that there is a fundamental limit on how many people we can interact with dates back to the 1990s, when anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed a link between the size of a primate’s brain and the typical size of its social group. Extrapolating to humans,…

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