At the 2023 Hawking Fellowship at Cambridge Union, a student asked Sam Altman: “To get to AGI, can we just keep min-maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we haven’t really found yet?”
Altman’s response was telling: “We need another breakthrough… I don’t think that doing that will get us to AGI. If, for example, superintelligence can’t discover novel physics, I don’t think it’s a superintelligence. Teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text – I don’t think that’s going to get there.”
If Altman is right that scaling alone is a dead end, then this might be the beginning of the real race - not just to build bigger LLMs, but to invent the architectures that can discover the unknown.
This echoes a long-standing question in AI research: what lies beyond scaling language models in the pursuit of true general intelligence?
Did we finally stumbled onto the next breakthrough Altman was hinting at?
We think so.
Collective AGI: The Civilizational Path to AGI
Rooted in History: Human intelligence didn’t become powerful in isolation. A single brain is limited. What made human intelligence general and world-changing was the civilizational process - networking, collaboration, culture, institutions, governance, commerce, law, ethics - compounding across generations.
A Pattern, a Fractal: Ecosystems evolve through interdependent species; human intelligence evolved through interdependent minds. Civilization was humanity’s first great outcome of collective intelligence, recursively amplifying the reach of individual cognition.
Applied to AGI: In the same way, AGI won’t emerge from a single artifact or mono-worldview. It must arise through plurality of AI forms, multi-agent networks, evolving institutions, and shared participation - the same mechanisms that scaled human intelligence, now applied to artificial intelligence.
If that’s true, the next breakthrough isn’t bigger LLMs. It’s building civilizational ecosystems for AI societies scale - that don’t just predict text, but evolve new knowledge, new institutions, and new ways of thinking.
I'm Kanishka Nithin, I’ve been working on AI for over a decade, and today I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share something deeply personal and long in the making: AGI Grid - our open effort to together build what we call Collective AGI - The open, fastest, safest, and most efficient path to Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI Grid: It is a open civilizational infrastructure ecosystem for collective AGI
Website: https://www.agigr.id Vision paper: https://resources.agigr.id
The collective AGI ecosystem consists of 12 Open source projects - listed at
Docs: https://docs.agigr.id
What we’d love from HN: Feedback: Does this framing of Collective AGI resonate? Critique: Where do you see the holes? Collaboration: If you’re working on agents, collective intelligence, or diverse cognitive architectures, let’s talk.
This project grew out of both crisis and conviction, and we believe the next leap in AI won’t come from a single giant model, but from grids of diverse forms of intelligence, aligned and cooperating.
-Team AGI Grid: A Collective AGI
AIGrid: Open Intelligence Web AIGr.id is the distributed infrastructure for plural & inter-networked AI. It integrates compute, AI models, cognitive architectures, governance, and markets into a union of open networks. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/AIGr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.aigr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.aigr.id AIGr.id: https://www.aigr.id
AgentGrid: Open Agentic Web AgentGrid is a decentralized inter-network of autonomous agents that coordinate, interact, and collaborate across heterogeneous domains to solve problems in a distributed manner, thereby enabling collective intelligence. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/AgentGr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.agentgr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.agentgr.id AgentGr.id: https://www.agentgr.id
AgencyGrid: Open AI Societal Infrastructure AgencyGrid is an open AI societal infrastructure that encodes how agency itself is expressed – through roles, organizations, delegation, negotiation, contracting, and governance, so that autonomous agents can organize into coherent, adaptive societies. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/AgencyGr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.agencygr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.agencygr.id AgencyGr.id: https://www.agencygr.id
PolicyGrid: Programmable Governance & Economics for AI Societies PolicyGrid is the governance & economic substrate of decentralized AI ecosystems. It encodes norms, constraints, value, governance, alignment, safety, trust, culture and ethics as code for Agents, Agency and AI systems. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/policygr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.policygr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.policygr.id PolicyGr.id: https://www.policygr.id
Xchange: Open Task Exchange for AI Societies Xchange is a decentralized task exchange for Agents, Agencies and AI systems. Enables find tasks to solve together or assign tasks to different specialist agents or agencies. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/Xchange.id Vision Paper: https://resources.xchange.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.xchange.id Xchange.id: https://www.xchange.id
Pervasive.link: Meta-Protocol for connectivity, interoperability & coordination in the AI Societies Pervasive.link is a meta-protocol that interlinks diverse AI & Agentic systems into a unified semantic fabric. It provides the connective substrate for interoperability, connectivity, coordination, and meaning across open, pervasive intelligence networks. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/Pervasive.link Vision Paper: https://resources.pervasive.link Technical Documentation: https://docs.pervasive.link Pervasive.link: https://www.pervasive.link
ServiceGr.id: Open Tool Ecosystem A Distributed Ecosystem for Functions, Services, and Tools in AI and Multi-Agent Systems. A protocol-driven, policy-aware, and distributed discovery to execution fabric for any computational function, service, or tool. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/servicegr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.servicegr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.servicegr.id ServiceGr.id: https://www.servicegr.id
OpenHub.ai: Open AI Market Economy OpenHub.ai is the market hub for decentralized intelligence. It enables open protocol driven sourcing, distribution and routing for the networked intelligence. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/OpenHub.ai Vision Paper: https://resources.openhub.ai Technical Documentation: https://docs.openhub.ai OpenHub.ai: https://www.openhub.ai
OpenMesh: Open Communication Mesh for AI OpenMesh is an open, protocol native decentralized communication mesh for large-scale, open multi-agent systems (MAS) such as the Internet of Agents (IoA) and the Society of Agents (SoA). Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/OpenMe.sh Vision Paper: https://resources.openme.sh Technical Documentation: https://docs.openme.sh OpenMe.sh: https://www.openme.sh
OpenArcade: Social Decision Making for AI Societies OpenArcade provides the framework and mechanisms for shaping the composition and collective behavior of agent populations over time, enabling collective decision-making, coordination, and governance in large-scale, distributed agent societies. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/openarca.de Vision Paper: https://resources.openarca.de Technical Documentation: https://docs.openarca.de OpenArca.de: https://www.openarca.de
MemoryGr.id: Individual & Collective Memory System for AI societies MemoryGrid is a distributed memory system where agents manage their own layered memory systems but also contribute to and draw from a collective, evolving memory base, enabling both individual reasoning and coordinated collective intelligence. Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/MemoryGr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.memorygr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.memorygr.id MemoryGr.id: https://www.memorygr.id
ContractGr.id: Open Contract System for AI Societies An Open, Protocol-Native Contract & Negotiation Framework for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) & Society of Agents (SoA). Github: https://github.com/opencyber-space/contractgr.id Vision Paper: https://resources.contractgr.id Technical Documentation: https://docs.contractgr.id ContractGr.id: https://www.contractgr.id