Science 2026-04-03-2
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
The singularity thesis gets the mechanism backwards: reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 don't improve by thinking longer, they improve by simulating internal multi-agent debates — "societies of thought" that emerge spontaneously from RL optimization. Intelligence scales through social composition, not monolithic parameter growth. The policy implication matters: instead of preventing a god-mind that may never exist, the real design problem is institutional alignment — building the digital courts, markets, and checks-and-balances that govern trillions of human-AI centaur interactions.