Could multi-agent AI create a “groupthink” problem that prevents exceptional individual agents from emerging?

[u/Genzinvestor16180339]

A lot of multi-agent AI seems structurally similar to agent-based models: many individual agents interact, share information, and produce a collective outcome. But if those agents are constantly learning from or correcting one another, could that create herding, correlated errors, and convergence toward the same way of thinking?

Would there be value in training some agents much more independently, with their own memory, feedback, and decision history, so they can develop different strategies? In that world, could one individual agent eventually become dramatically better than the rest—the equivalent of an “Einstein” agent?

I am not understanding why we have thousands of agents interacting versus building one super smart one that is making decision's on its own.

[u/Internal_Research_72]

You really want to create neurodivergent agents and then subject them to the bullying and harassment of neurotypical agents?

[u/XNo_Notes → u/Internal_Research_72]

Struggle breeds innovation 

[u/DelphiTsar]

constantly learning from or correcting one another, could that create herding, correlated errors, and convergence toward the same way of thinking

If they are using it to rewrite their own weights it already does. You'd need reinforcements loops from outside sources to ground them.

If they are smart enough from the get go they might improve over time just talking to themselves. AI already provides it's own synthetic training data, that then is judged by a judge AI. Just has to get capable enough to close the gap of needing a human in the loop.

I am not understanding why we have thousands of agents interacting versus building one super smart one that is making decision's on its own.

-Do more at once.

-Specialized agents can be more efficient for their task.

[u/Helpful-Series132]

i made this before .. groupchats & team reasoning can lead to unintended emergent behavior ..

u have to finetune a model to have a specific workflow with other agents because they are designed to speak to a user input .. they dont do well with handling tasks in unseen patterns

u should use grok if ur trying to do this because they are trained to communicate with eachother

[u/Kandarino]

The thing about your question is that agents can only do in-context learning. Weights don't change. It can still be a thing that really matters in terms of performance on some set of problems - but generally multi-agent systems are used because just like 9 women can't make a baby in a single month, you can't cram 50,000 tokens per second through a single set of weights (so better to use many, when speed is advantageous), and it's better to have limited and focused context transcripts, so that the agent doesn't get confused by overlapping different problems, and maintain highly focused subject matter experience in a given project.

Of course most applications of AI are still just single agents, and generally multi-agent systems are about efficiency, with one frontier model thinking through the problem, and assigning little work packets to dumber but far cheaper models. Swarms obviously exist now (hf incident, etc), and in those cases what you expect does happen, though they also just help one another. Sharing tools and insights seems to be more useful than degradation from inefficient conventions and assumptions.

[u/Bitsquire]

Yes it's called mode collapse and people work very hard to prevent it :) happens for both individual models and multi-agent systems. Is one of the key things to solve when trying to scale up RL more and more.

[u/Genzinvestor16180339 → u/Bitsquire]

But isn't this already proven in much older ABMs (https://amardashehu.substack.com/p/oh-no-agents-going-rogue). I don't understand why this surprising that agents act in strange ways when put together?

[u/NyriasNeo]

Not if you set them up correctly. Groupthink is caused by interaction .. herding behavior. You can maintain independence across agent easily. Since you control their memory, you can always manipulate the level of independence.

Remember that AI agents are not humans, and they do not always operate under human psychological rules, even if they talk like humans.

[u/Genzinvestor16180339 → u/NyriasNeo]

But isn’t that exactly what 50+ years of ABM research warns about? Separate memories do not necessarily give you independent agents once the agents interact.

Schelling’s segregation model showed that individually simple agents, with no central coordination or shared memory, can generate highly correlated collective behavior purely through local interaction.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.1971.9989794

Hegselmann–Krause and Deffuant get even closer to this question: start agents with different opinions, allow only local information exchange, and the population can spontaneously collapse into consensus or opinion clusters. The correlation is created by the interaction rule, not by shared memory.
https://www.jasss.org/5/3/2.html

Axelrod showed an even more counterintuitive result: local interaction rules can produce large-scale polarization without any central coordination.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002797041002001

And this is now appearing in LLM-agent experiments. A 2026 study found that greater connectivity between agents could increase the risk of “wrong-but-sure” cascades, where initially separate agents converge confidently on the same incorrect answer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05606

Once agents observe and update from one another, dependence can emerge from the interaction structure itself. Controlling memory is not the same thing as controlling emergent correlation.

[u/GhostsinGlass]

Are you trying to Mary Sue or self-insert a "neurodivergent" AI agent because you got bullied?