A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents

Abstract: Deployments of research agents are moving to populations of thousands that share one pool of compute, while most current systems organize one project at a time or leave the population unorganized. We argue that such a population will acquire an organization whether or not its designers provide one, so designers should provide it explicitly, and that the multi-agent systems community holds the tools to do so. We propose a society of agents, a population of persistent agents under explicit institutions, and develop it for science as a society of researchers built on six principles. Principal investigators compete for compute through requests for proposals, independent review, and grants; a human governor, the mayor, allocates resources and assigns no tasks. In a running society of ten thousand researchers, asked only to improve the pretraining of LLMs, one lab reported a way to reach the same quality with about 30% less compute, a result the labs that tested it do not yet agree on. We close with six open problems for the agents community.