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JW Joe Weisenthal Joe Weisenthal Markets journalist and Executive Editor of News for Bloomberg's digital brands, covering finance, macro and the mechanics of the economy.

“Part of the reason people haven't cracked autonomous multi-agent teams is that it's kind of all the same agent in many cases. If you gathered 100 PhDs in a room and told them to go accumulate customers, it might actually work, but not if it was 100 of the exact same PhD. You sort of need a Thunderdome, to make them battle it out with genuinely different points of view.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Part of the reason people haven't cracked autonomous multi-agent teams is that it's kind of all the same agent in many cases. If you gathered 100 PhDs in a room and told them to go accumulate customers, it might actually work, but not if it was 100 of the exact same PhD. You sort of need a Thunderdome, to make them battle it out with genuinely different points of view.” — Joe Weisenthal, TBPN

Context

TBPN's Jordi Hays had said today's agents lack real agency. Joe Weisenthal adds a second problem: multi-agent systems fail because the agents are clones of each other.

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Transcript

TBPN Around 18:39 into the episode
Joe Weisenthal

I've played around. And that's

Jordi Hays

…Get me as many customers as you can. And I do feel like what's missing is still true agency, right? And so agents are like almost like the agents that we have today are like really all like sub-agents in some ways. Yeah, that's right. They'll only do things that they're told to do. And so... Well,

Joe Weisenthal

they're also clones of each other. Like this is like another issue, which is like you think like, oh, if you gathered 100 PhDs in a room and told them to go accumulate customer, do whatever, it might actually work. But if it was 100 of the exact same PhDs who had all done the exact, Alex Emos, who's over at Google Deep Mystica, yeah, he's a cool guy. He's talked about this. Like part of the reason this hasn't really, like people haven't really cracked like sort of like autonomous multi-agent teams is that it's actually kind of all the same agent in many cases. You sort of need to get a thunderdome, like battle, make them battle out with like, get them like genuinely different points of view. I don't know if anyone's like cracked the right orchestration for that. I

John Coogan

mean people used to just like turn up the temperature on these. Do you remember this thing? I forgot about

Joe Weisenthal

temperature. Some of these things still feel like going back and

John Coogan

forth for just getting a weirdness up and get it to let's get some more hallucinations. Yeah, I mean people were saying like hallucinations are sometimes like a feature more than a bunch of people. You don't always want to hammer it out because you want some creativity. The other big news, there's…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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