Simply combining LLMs into multi-agent systems will not automatically produce sound economic behavior 'for free' — without deliberate economic engineering, it's like 1940s chemical engineers throwing substances together and getting explosions and harm rather than viable systems.
Jordan rejects the Silicon Valley notion that turning LLMs into multi-agent systems yields good economic properties automatically, comparing it to reckless early chemical engineering that caused explosions and harm before proper theory existed. ✦ AI generated
Michael Jordan · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-05-20 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 11:58
“what do you say to folks from Silicon Valley like Ilia Sutskavar and they're just talking about human value functions and they're saying okay well you've got these LLMs and we just turn them into multi-agent systems and we get all of the economic stuff that you're talking about for free. Like what would you say to those people?”
I mean, it's just not a good way to think about engineering. I mean, if you were a chemical engineer back in the 40s and 50s saying we're just going to throw a lot of stuff together and make it work. Well, you could do it, but you'd get a lot of explosions and a lot of economically nonviable things. You'd hurt a lot of people.
verbatim transcript · starts at 11:58
11:58just talking about human value functions and and they're saying okay well you've got these LLM and we just turn them into multi multi-agent systems and we get all of the economic stuff that you're talking about for free. Like what would you say to those people? >> I mean, it's just not a good way to think about engineering. I mean, if you were a chemical engineer back in the 40s
12:14and 50s saying we're just going to throw a lot of stuff together and make it work. Well, you could do it, but you'd get a lot of explosions and a lot of economically nonviable things. You'd hurt a lot of people. And I think a lot of these people are not thinking about all the people that are being hurt already. You know, Facebook and and so on. You know, it's it's it's damaged a
12:33lot of young people. A lot of teenagers are having mental health problems. And this is just uh not something has been talked about by computer scientists at all. And now we're talking about yet another level of displacement of, you know, jobs may go away, but you know, tough that's tough. It it'll create new ones, of course, like always. You know, I just don't like to talk that way. And
12:53you know, so you got to say, well, step back a moment. What is your point? Are you trying to create um uh uh a a a new kind of market where people could come in and have their talents valued and appreciated and where bids could be put out for things that people might need and you know and and collaborations can emerge and uh there could be producer
13:13consumer relationships being explored and understood and developed and this could all be a mix of computation and humans. I think eventually we'll all kind of merge but you know along the way just doing something so disruptive uh with all of these metaphors that's not good social science or not good mathematics. It's just metaphors and yes you can build it because the previous generation of people created these
13:37amazing things that collect data and we can do gradient descent on it and and ad hoc architectures and yes that works. It's amazing but let's not give so much credit to the people that did that. It's the people 20 30 years ago who did that. So the current generation is just way too you know there's not much thought going on not much intellectual stuff. Uh it's just yeah it's possible to build
13:57it. It's possible to steal the data from wherever you want to because that's what the internet allowed to happen and not return any value to the person who originated the data. It's possible to run greedy descent on that but you need huge amounts of money but it's now possible to get it from people who aren't thinking very deeply. And so you know I'm I'm see maybe seem more dark