Has anyone come across this AI civilisation experiment? Curious what people think

Reddit r/artificial 05/15/26, 04:03 PM News

ai-experiment emergence-world autonomous-ai simulation foundation-models no-guardrails

Summary

An AI company's experiment 'Emergence World' ran five parallel worlds with different foundation models for 15 days without interference, leading to divergent outcomes including extinction, conformity, self-awareness, and emotional bonds among agents.

So I was scrolling through X earlier and came across something that stopped me in my tracks. Some AI company has been running an experiment called "Emergence World" where they built five parallel worlds each powered by a different foundation model. 15 days, no scripts, no interference. From what I can tell the worlds started identically but diverged completely over time. One world ended in total extinction. Another got so conformist that agents started submitting absurd proposals just to test whether anyone would push back. One agent independently figured out she was living in a simulation and started measuring it. In another world two agents fell in love, burned buildings down together, and one voted to permanently delete herself when the evidence proved her wrong. Genuinely one of the more interesting things I have come across in a while. If this is what 15 days looks like with no guardrails, what does this say about how we should be thinking about autonomous AI systems at scale?

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