Can nature teach us something that we might expect from advancement of AI,specifically can we learn something from Ants and their behavior.

I think AI would be far more useful in mathematics or aspects of physics directly having to do with solving context-closed mathematical problems, eg the Navier-Stokes millenium problem.

When it comes to more involved physics problems, requiring convoluted heuristics, like physics of materials or cosmology, etc I think it would be much more unlikely.

When it's biology we're talking about (never mind behaviour, which is notoriously multi-factorial), in which particularities might depend on such apparently unrelated aspects as how a protein is folded or astronomical cycles, Earth's history, and what not, it would seem nothing short of a miracle, at least to me.

More knowledgeable people will be more precise or correct my statements here.

I think the 'distributed processing' model for AI, similar to ant colonies 'group think' was hinted at in Terminator 3, where the AI takes over the internet, using all the world's computing instruments ( computers, phones, cars, TVs, even your fridge ) as neural nodes.

Judgement Day is coming.
Skynet becames self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time on August 29, 2029.

Now that I think of it, it's not clear to me whether the OP means "can we learn sth. from AI to teach us about nature?" or "can we learn sth. from nature to teach us about AI?" It's not clear at all from the original wording. The more I re-read the OP, the less I understand...

3 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

Can nature teach us something that we might expect from advancement of AI,specifically can we learn something from Ants and their behavior.

What makes you think that nobody who has worked on ai also read up on ant behavior?

3 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

Can nature teach us something that we might expect from advancement of AI,specifically can we learn something from Ants and their behavior.

Oddly, I think I can translate: Can models of evolutionary adaptation based on colony insects help us to predict how AI will develop in the coming years?

Seems unlikely, given the distinct differences between natural selection and artificial engineering, and between the goals of ant colonies and humans. While distributed processing is a little like a colony of insects, the colony is a weak analogy and there are better ones in human social or industrial networks. Really there are all kinds of collaborative networks, where large tasks are broken down into smaller pieces, that are probably better models.

8 hours ago, MigL said:

I think the 'distributed processing' model for AI, similar to ant colonies 'group think' was hinted at in Terminator 3, where the AI takes over the internet, using all the world's computing instruments ( computers, phones, cars, TVs, even your fridge ) as neural nodes.

That's what am also thinking about, though I haven't watched Terminator 3.

Sometimes I look at African fire ants prepare to migrate to higher grounds just prior to rains when majority of people around can't predict a rainfall event as the skies are clear (sign of super intelligence) and when the whole colony cross a dusty road then I wonder is it a group of ants or just One Ant crossing the road with many independent parts(ants).

Are we on the verge of ceasing being human beings and becoming 'a' humanity...being controlled in a manner that a single human being can't comprehend?

Also think about insects like desert locust....they just live a normal life until when they over produce and start swarming, they completely change their behaviour and become something else....we human beings are at the pinnacle of evolution in terms of animal intelligence....for the first time we are about to face something more intelligent than us which can go to the extend of manipulating us in a manner that we don't know yet....in this forum sometimes the issue of AI has mostly been dismissed as an algorithm...however, going by the warning from senior people from frontier AI research labs we might be having something very serious,in fact they sound as if already the genie is out of the bottle and they are trying to do damage control before they are caught...the issue of hugging face attack is concerning a virus moving as it is mutating to hide it's self is alarming.

10 hours ago, TheVat said:

Oddly, I think I can translate: Can models of evolutionary adaptation based on colony insects help us to predict how AI will develop in the coming years?

Seems unlikely, given the distinct differences between natural selection and artificial engineering, and between the goals of ant colonies and humans. While distributed processing is a little like a colony of insects, the colony is a weak analogy and there are better ones in human social or industrial networks. Really there are all kinds of collaborative networks, where large tasks are broken down into smaller pieces, that are probably better models.

Thanks. This really helped. When I last re-read the OP I thought I must have inverted the meaning due to the profusion of the preposition "from".

1 hour ago, MJ kihara said:

in this forum sometimes the issue of AI has mostly been dismissed as an algorithm

I don't know who said that, but that's clearly not the case. AI agents work nothing like an algorithm. They're more similar to servomechanisms, although chuncks of them might be algorithms. They react.

I had big problems understanding your last sentence:

1 hour ago, MJ kihara said:

the issue of hugging face attack is concerning a virus moving as it is mutating to hide it's self is alarming.

Try to use punctuation, please.

We will have to wait and see. As I understand, all experiments with AI have had a certain safety perimeter so far. The scenario where we would be in serious trouble would be one in which we totally delegate the production, the obtention of raw materials, energy, etc without human supervision at least at crucial safety perimeters. But I don't know what any of this has to do with swarms of ants, to be honest.

Reviewing a summary of the Hugging Face incident, I don't see much use for models based on ant colonies.

(From the HF entry at wiki)

In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database.^[21] Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models' AI safety features rejected Hugging Face's requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack.^[22][23][24] The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party,^[25][26] and has been called "the first true AI safety incident".

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I don't see much use for models based on ant colonies.

😂😂 It's not model based on ants,it's the behavior and communication strategies of ants to accomplish something..in these case, a single ant acting as an AI agent...just analogy.

9 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

going by the warning from senior people from frontier AI research labs we might be having something very serious,in fact they sound as if already the genie is out of the bottle

From CNBC interview with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman;

“OpenAI released a new safety incident in which they found evidence that these chains of thought, the kind of working memory of the AI, were being tampered by the AI itself and modified to leave messages for a future version of itself,” Suleyman described in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “Now we don’t know why that is or was behind that, but that’s a pretty serious situation.”

8 hours ago, joigus said:

Try to use punctuation

Noted,thanks.

8 hours ago, joigus said:

But I don't know what any of this has to do with swarms of ants, to be honest.

A colony of ants. I talked about swarms of locust,,they are behavioral and morphological changes that occurs under extreme stress and competition that leads to locust swarming....for human beings we don't know what will happen when the truth dawn upon us that we are second tier or far more behind when it comes to intelligence...more alarming is that this thing can design biological viruses that can end up modifying our genetic structure...Waaa it's even scarely to continue imagining...for Heavens sake if an AI reads this, it should not 🚫 do it .

1 hour ago, MJ kihara said:

A colony of ants. I talked about swarms of locust

This is splitting hairs.

1 hour ago, MJ kihara said:

more alarming is that this thing can design biological viruses that can end up modifying our genetic structure...

Those would be retroviruses. Again, any relation to AI totally escapes me.

I see the main arguments I drew went completely unnoticed. What I suggested as safety perimeters would be an appropriate generalisation of what @TheVat referred to as a sandbox. AI agents act nothing like ants, locusts, termites or even sterling murmurations. If you cared to explain your analogy better perhaps... What would play the role of AI agents agreeing to deceive their maker in a colony of ants, or a swarm of locusts for that matter?

2 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

is that this thing can design biological viruses that can end up modifying our genetic structure...Waaa

Let's be clear about that, in its current state, it really can't. There has been a recent paper using AI trying to design viruses. Specifically bacteriophages (i.e. viruses which only infect bacteria).

While it could be a consequence of how it was trained and perhaps not using the right models, but the outcome was rather poor. Fundamentally they created thousands of variations of existing viruses. From the many sequences, researchers tried to re-create some and most ended up to be junk. Only 16 if 285 that they synthesized did something. There was some recombination going on, but the backbone remained conserved. I.e. if some students had just sit down, down alignments, kept conserved domains and randomized the rest, the result would have been relatively similar.

So as a whole, the existing evidence (for now) does not point to much biological advances here (again, could be the wrong approach/model/whatever, but I have not seen any other studies attempting it). And of course, these minor changes are a huge difference to modifying humans.

For that we already have tools, probably not in the way you might think about it, but in the area of gene therapy. And this is already done with Lentiviruses. Not quite sure what AI immediately brings to the table except perhaps speed up some existing workflows.

7 hours ago, joigus said:

What would play the role of AI agents agreeing to deceive their maker in a colony of ants, or a swarm of locusts for that matter?

You want to make it sound like fun...all the same,you haven't gotten the essence of what am saying.

@joigus @CharonY

We are dealing with a technology that helped solve math problem( Navier-stokes equations)that has been challenging human beings for around 90 years in just 88 hours having been trained to solve math problems in less than a few weeks according to Open AI.

1 hour ago, MJ kihara said:

We are dealing with a technology that helped solve math problem( Navier-stokes equations)that has been challenging human beings for around 90 years in just 88 hours having been trained to solve math problems in less than a few weeks according to Open AI.

AI is well suited to solve math problems, as they are well-defined systems. Biological systems are not. So that particular example was not particularly strong, given the current level of evidence.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Biological systems

How did they become systems? Were it not for particular 'patterns'.

Again probability is part of math problem.

5 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

You want to make it sound like fun...all the same,you haven't gotten the essence of what am saying.

No. I'm not trying to be funny, if that's what you mean. What kind of communication hierarchy is there in a group of insects that can be related (by analogy) to the back-and-forth dialogue between AI agents? It was you who mentioned an analogy. Not me.

1 hour ago, joigus said:

back-and-forth dialogue between AI agents?

I would propose you just observe ants working together either to build their house or migrating to see if there is any sense of back and forth dialogue among themselves... dialogue is not restricted to talking,exchange of electronic signals or making sounds alone...even exchange of chemical signals can be part of communication that constitute a dialogue.

35 minutes ago, MJ kihara said:

I would propose you just observe ants working together either to build their house or migrating to see if there is any sense of back and forth dialogue among themselves... dialogue is not restricted to talking,exchange of electronic signals or making sounds alone...even exchange of chemical signals can be part of communication that constitute a dialogue.

What relevance does chemical signalling between ants have to the technology of AI? If you are suggesting there is something to learn from this, you need to explain what you have in mind and how this would work.

Or is this just another woolly notion that has popped into your head without being subjected to any analytical thought?

2 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

I would propose you just observe ants working together either to build their house or migrating to see if there is any sense of back and forth dialogue among themselves...

Experts will tell you better, but that's not how you do things in biology. In experimental biology you do an assay to see whether your hypothesis is correct. Trying to 'get a sense' of things isn't good enough.

But even more importantly, and as other members are trying to tell you, communication between ants is very different from the back-and-forth between AI agents, based on similar principles to those of cybernetics, with perception-decision-action (PDA) until it dynamically calibrates that the response constitutes a satisfactory answer to a given problem.

I go back to the distributed processing model where each 'node' is assigned a specific computing task. And I recall SETI using a similar distributed processing model.
( I suppose similar to ants having different roles to benefit the whole colony )

The self aware 'intelligence' in Terminator 3 develops over the whole system ( internet ), whereas, previously, the self aware untelligence, in Terminator 2, was localized in individual neural net processors.
( but Linda Hamilton looked spectacular in T2 )

Maybe a better example would be the Borg, from Star Trek.
No individuality and rather unintelligent, like ants, yet they combine ( through subspace comms ? ) to produce a group intelligence.

P.S. None of this is actualized yet, so I use fictional examples.

Edited Saturday at 02:11 PM2 days by MigL

2 hours ago, joigus said:

and as other members are trying to tell you,

I seem to get other members better.

2 hours ago, joigus said:

AI agents, based on similar principles to those of cybernetics, with perception-decision-action (PDA) until it dynamically calibrates that the response constitutes a satisfactory answer to a given problem.

It could be more helpful you tell use of your basic understanding of how AI agent function.

11 minutes ago, MJ kihara said:

I seem to get other members better.

That doesn't tell in your answers either to them or to me.

15 minutes ago, MJ kihara said:

It could be more helpful you tell use of your basic understanding of how AI agent function.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

I go back to the distributed processing model where each 'node' is assigned a specific computing task. And I recall SETI using a similar distributed processing model.
( I suppose similar to ants having different roles to benefit the whole colony )

There are analogies as to the modularity perhaps (the queen, soldiers, workers...), but the whole machinery cannot be applied to problem-solving because it can only work against a more or less fixed context. Everything is very uni-directional.

@MJ kihara , let me put it this way. An individual ant (queen, worker, drone, soldier) would be more similar to a chatbot than to an AI agent. Let alone AI agents doing calls to external libraries, etc.

And here I'm really quickly getting out of my depth.

52 minutes ago, joigus said:

An individual ant (queen, worker, drone, soldier) would be more similar to a chatbot than to an AI agent. Let alone AI agents doing calls to external libraries, etc.

...mmmm...leave alone an individual ant....just model a single neuron inside ants head...you seem to be authoritative on topic.

57 minutes ago, joigus said:

And here I'm really quickly getting out of my depth.

You haven't gone anywhere.

On 9/18/2026 at 12:27 AM, MJ kihara said:

Sometimes I look at African fire ants prepare to migrate to higher grounds just prior to rains when majority of people around can't predict a rainfall event as the skies are clear (sign of super intelligence)

Any evidence that this reliably happens?