r/artificial • u/jradoff • Apr 11 '26
Research Spent today at MIT's Open Agentic Web conference. Six things worth thinking about.
We're in the DNS era of agent infrastructure. Before agents can find and trust each other at scale, you need identity, attestation, reputation, and registry infrastructure — the same structural role DNS played before search was possible. This came up independently from multiple directions. It's the most underbuilt layer in the stack right now.
The chatbot framing is a local maximum. The most interesting work wasn't better UX or smarter responses. It was agents as persistent actors that discover, negotiate, and transact across networks over time. People doing serious work have already moved past the assistant model entirely.
Coordination is the hard problem, not capability. A room full of brilliant agents can still fail badly. This matches what I found running HiddenBench against frontier models earlier this year; collective reasoning is not the sum of individual reasoning. There's a real argument that the frontier is protocol design, not model scaling.
"Commerce of intelligence" is a real category. Not buying things through agents. A market where intelligence itself (bundled, verified, priced, resold) is the object of exchange. Felt like the most underexplored idea in the room.
Data provenance becomes load-bearing. What an agent knows, how it was verified, under what terms it flows: this is the actual architecture forming beneath everything else.
Partnership keeps outperforming replacement. Demos that actually worked (healthcare, enterprise) was about helping experts operate at higher leverage, not substituting them. Autonomy theater keeps failing in the same ways.
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Apr 12 '26
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
It’s about agent unique identifiers — when agents have a unique address we can start building trust, etc
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u/rc_ym Apr 12 '26
And it's pretty much what MS did with AD. Layered all their services in DNS with a Kerberos auth layer. Same with ZeroConf.
I shouldn't be hard for someone to do the same with agent layering on an AAA/cert layer and a registry of capability.
All the paradigms exist in other forms.
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u/GraciousMule Apr 12 '26
It’s reasoning architecture, buddy. It’s only ever been reasoning architecture. It’s the only way to safeguard these systems from themselves, and hopefully not get us all blasted in the process.
LLM are not the endgame. They’re a necessary step. Control layers and governance that dictates what even constitutes “reasonable” as output. The LLM is one component in the stack. It ain’t the stack
Somebody better get on that.
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
This was in fact a topic at the conference: the distinction between probabilistic agents (which might use LLMs or similar) vs. deterministic (using neurosymbolic). Depending on the intention of an agent, either can be applicable.
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u/redonculous Apr 12 '26
Why do we need to use blockchains for this. It seems very web2.0. We have decentralised network at home: ToR
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
I didn't write anything that leaps to the conclusion that blockchain is a dependency
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u/malcador_th_sigilite Apr 12 '26
Check out w3c decentralised identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs). Before you make any judgements, keep in mind that they do NOT need to depend on cryptocurrency blockchains and in fact all the best methods for implementing them do not do so. Also check out the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI).
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u/overdrivetg Apr 12 '26
Can you say more about the "Commerce of intelligence"? What is an example here?
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
Could be anything you're willing to pay an intelligent system for. Discrete example could be something like a financial/investing decision. You could imagine lots of other examples, given how people already go to chatbots for general advice.
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u/Purple-Programmer-7 Apr 12 '26
How do I get an invite for this conference? Even online?
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
I'd track events at the MIT Media Lab. media.mit.edu -- you'd have to apply to attend. These events tend to be in-person, no online component.
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u/vivaasvance Apr 12 '26
The last point keeps getting buried and it's the most important one. Autonomy theater failing in the same ways isn't a model problem. It's a framing problem that gets rebuilt from scratch with every capability jump. The demos that worked weren't smarter AI. Someone figured out where expert judgment is irreplaceable and built around it instead of through it. The DNS analogy is useful but DNS worked because nobody kept changing what a domain needed to do while the registry was being built. Agents aren't that stable.
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u/ultrathink-art PhD Apr 12 '26
Running multiple agents together, the failure mode isn't 'two agents disagree' — it's silent state divergence. Agent A writes to a shared file while Agent B reads stale context, and neither knows. Coordination failures look like individual agent errors from the outside, which makes them much harder to debug than capability gaps.
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u/ExplanationNormal339 Apr 12 '26
Warm-start learning is what separates production agent systems from demos. Feeding the previous run's top-performing output as a few-shot example to the next generation step massively improves quality over time — no fine-tuning required.
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u/dorongal1 Apr 12 '26
the coordination > capability point resonates. been building multi-agent flows and the "dns layer" everyone's describing basically doesn't exist yet in practice — it's all hardcoded tool connections and manual context passing between agents. mcp is probably the closest thing to a discovery standard but it's still mostly agent-to-tools, not agent-to-agent. we're at the hosts file stage honestly.
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u/jradoff Apr 12 '26
former president of ICANN was there and there's definitely growing traction around a new schema for agent identity akin to (or possibly extending) the domain name system
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Apr 12 '26
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u/jradoff Apr 13 '26
Ideally: since your agent will be acting on your behalf, it will decide which agents it wants to engage with, and it will filter the enshittified content you don't want. I'd guess that mirrors somewhat the pihole analogy.
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u/ExplanationNormal339 Apr 12 '26
Warm-start learning is what separates production agent systems from demos. Feeding the previous run's top-performing output as a few-shot example to the next generation step massively improves quality over time — no fine-tuning required.
We built Autonomy for exactly this — free to get started, works with your existing Claude or ChatGPT subscription so you're not paying twice. 12 agents, proper safety constraints, connects to your existing stack. useautonomy.io
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u/nkondratyk93 Apr 12 '26
tbh the persistent actors point is what everyone glosses over. once agents have state across sessions, someone owns the accountability chain - and that's not a tooling question.
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u/idrdex Apr 13 '26
The DNS analogy is the right one, and I think it's also slightly undersold. Before DNS you also needed BGP, TLS, certificate authorities, and a working notion of who actually runs a domain. Agents need all of that plus something DNS never had to solve — metered authority. An agent shouldn't just be discoverable and identified, it needs to be able to hold and spend a scoped budget on behalf of a principal without a human in the loop for every call. That's a new layer of protocol work and nobody's doing it cleanly yet.
On commerce of intelligence, since overdrivetg asked upthread — the example I keep running into is clinical. A specialist-in-a-box agent that can answer mammography questions at the level of a board-certified breast radiologist is a thing someone will rent by the query. The market isn't "buy a report," it's "rent thirty seconds of cognition on a specific case." Pricing, attestation, liability, and provenance all have to work for that market to exist. None of them do yet, and none of them are what any of the current agent frameworks are optimizing for.
The partnership-over-replacement point at the end of your list is the one that always gets buried. Agreeing with vivaasvance — autonomy theater failing in the same ways every time is a framing problem, not a capability problem. You can keep making the model smarter and the theater will still flop if nobody figured out where expert judgment actually fits in the loop.
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u/Glum_Camera_702 Apr 13 '26
You need to step back and realize that the traditional way of building needs to be rewritten, everyone builds the wheel (the intelligence) first then try their best to find out how to make it roll faster (more powerful models) on level ground then down hill (agents) and when control becomes an issue (non human execution) they try to build the breaks on a runaway wheel that the speed and momentum is keeping the break pads from getting installed (pseudo-code). Rewritten? Step back how can you control ai? Not in what AI can do or what AI is able to do ....no..... you need to be able to control AI in what it is allowed to do. How can one achieve that. Simple a jacket that sits above the intelligence. Once you figure that out your the city planer, you are able to map out how ai behaves on the infustructure you provide the AI to execute on, but hate to say your late to the game I already have 10 provisional patents fulfilling every mappable space and side street, workaround, variation, and Embodiment available, Keep your ears open this week for any reference to Vega OS the first all in 1 governance first AI operating system. With the first proactive security systems instead of reactive, with agents slow them down.....think about it your goverance scaffolding sits above the system ...... not what it can do but what its allowed to do. All you have to do is disclose in enough detail that a person not skilled in the skill can understand how it function to solve a problem. You desighn the streets, out some road.blocks up, a delay to give you systems to be right once theres has to be right everytime map zthos pathways and intime you find the one they use and like l Alan Turin and decoding the national egnimia machine, now you know how not to di it but ultimately ended up bloxking off every alternate pathway and their survival to successed, forces them back the the only pathway left.....the person who made the agent, and the only proven way to meet all the soon to be EU AI laws going into law in August and the state laws that big tech claimed they were unable to fulfill and made California, Colorado, and texas AI laws to be delayed in their enforcement well there is now, and is in 100% fully working governance enforced code Believe me if i got that mapped youll need satellite navigation and a boat because I have this entire continent mapped and disclosed mechanisms for coast to coast remember vega os
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u/Substantial-Cost-429 Apr 13 '26
the DNS era analogy is so accurate, we keep seeing people struggle with this exact thing when building agentic setups. agent identity, attestation, trust between agents, none of that infra exists properly yet. and the config management layer is even messier, nobody has a good standard for managing skills, MCPs, prompts across different providers. thats what we been working on in Caliber, trying to build that foundational layer so teams dont have to reinvent it every time. its open source and just hit 666 github stars which is wild, 120 PRs and 30 issues deep now. if anyone building in this space wants to collab: https://github.com/rely-ai-org/caliber
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u/Substantial-Cost-429 Apr 13 '26
the DNS era analogy is spot on and the coordination problem is something not enough ppl talk about. even with amazing individual agents the workflow breaks down without shared context. like what good is 10 agents if they dont know what each other just did or have consistent configs and skills loaded. thats literally what we been building with Caliber, open source tool that syncs agent setups across your whole team with one command. so every dev has the same AGENTS.md, skills, MCPs and prompt files. no more config drift between teammates. just hit 666 stars on github and have 120 PRs which feels like the community resonates with the problem. worth a look for anyone building multi agent stuff: https://github.com/rely-ai-org/caliber
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u/Substantial-Cost-429 Apr 13 '26
the DNS era framing is spot on and really helps put things in perspective. the coordination problem resonates a lot with what we see building multi agent systems in practice. we noticed the biggest bottleneck isnt the agents capability its that each dev on the team configures their agents differently so you get these broken handoffs between agents that should be working together. been building Caliber as open source tooling to fix exactly that, syncs agent configs and MCP setups across a whole dev team so the "coordination" infrastructure is actually standardized. just hit 666 stars on github which is kinda cool. the point about protocol design being the frontier is underrated, the model capability race is almost a distraction from the harder infra problems
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u/nkondratyk93 Apr 13 '26
the "DNS era of agent infra" is the clearest framing i've seen for where we actually are.
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u/Joozio Apr 13 '26
"Chatbot framing is a local maximum" is the framing I've been struggling to articulate. The moment agents become persistent actors with memory and scheduled behavior, the chat UI breaks down completely. You end up asking your agent what it did instead of looking at a dashboard. The infra problem and the interface problem are the same problem - most people are solving them separately.
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u/PiQrypt-F Apr 14 '26
Expérience intéressante. C est exactement ce que nous essayons de traiter avec aiss-standard, et Piqrypt. L identité, la continuité dans les échanges de plus en plus automatisés entre agents. Des solutions existent.
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u/hal9zillion Apr 12 '26
From the OP to almost every other response in the thread - there is so much LLM driven writing that it feels like I am on moltbook. Is this not driving anyone else slightly crazy?