Von Neumann’s idea of self-replicating automata describes machines that can reproduce themselves given a blueprint and a suitable environment. I’m exploring a concept that tries to apply this idea to AI in a modern context:

• AI agents (or “fungus nodes”) that run on federated servers
• They communicate via ActivityPub (used in Mastodon and the Fediverse)
• Each node can train models locally, then merge or share models with others
• Knowledge and behavior are stored in RDF graphs + code (acting like a blueprint)
• Agents evolve via co-training and mutation, they can switch learning groups and also chose to defederate different parts of the network

This creates something like a digital ecosystem of AI agents, growing across the social web; with nodes being able to freely train their models, which indirectly results in shared models moving across the network in comparison to siloed models of current federated learning.

My question: Is this kind of architecture - blending self-replicating AI agents, federated learning, and social protocols like ActivityPub - feasible and scalable in practice? Or are there fundamental barriers (technical, theoretical, or social) that would limit it?

I started to realize this using an architecture with four micro-services for each node (frontend, backend, knowledge graph using fuseki jena and activitypub-communicator); however, it brings my local laptop to its limits even with 8 nodes.

The question could also be stated differently: how much compute would be necessary to trigger non trivial behaviours that can generate some value to sustain the overall system?

MyceliumWebServer: running 8 fungus nodes locally to train AI models (communication happens via ActivityPub)

In the graphic, every purple node is a running music recommendation service. They can collaborate in teams to together train AI models (the orange nodes). The communication happens over ActivityPub...

MakerTube (makertube.net)

Von Neumann’s idea of self-replicating automata describes machines that can reproduce themselves given a blueprint and a suitable environment. I’m exploring a concept that tries to apply this idea to AI in a modern context:

• AI agents (or “fungus nodes”) that run on federated servers
• They communicate via ActivityPub (used in Mastodon and the Fediverse)
• Each node can train models locally, then merge or share models with others
• Knowledge and behavior are stored in RDF graphs + code (acting like a blueprint)
• Agents evolve via co-training and mutation, they can switch learning groups and also chose to defederate different parts of the network

This creates something like a digital ecosystem of AI agents, growing across the social web; with nodes being able to freely train their models, which indirectly results in shared models moving across the network in comparison to siloed models of current federated learning.

My question: Is this kind of architecture - blending self-replicating AI agents, federated learning, and social protocols like ActivityPub - feasible and scalable in practice? Or are there fundamental barriers (technical, theoretical, or social) that would limit it?

I started to realize this using an architecture with four micro-services for each node (frontend, backend, knowledge graph using fuseki jena and activitypub-communicator); however, it brings my local laptop to its limits even with 8 nodes.

The question could also be stated differently: how much compute would be necessary to trigger non trivial behaviours that can generate some value to sustain the overall system?

MyceliumWebServer: running 8 fungus nodes locally to train AI models (communication happens via ActivityPub)

In the graphic, every purple node is a running music recommendation service. They can collaborate in teams to together train AI models (the orange nodes). The communication happens over ActivityPub...

MakerTube (makertube.net)

Von Neumann’s idea of self-replicating automata describes machines that can reproduce themselves given a blueprint and a suitable environment. I’m exploring a concept that tries to apply this idea to AI in a modern context:

• AI agents (or “fungus nodes”) that run on federated servers
• They communicate via ActivityPub (used in Mastodon and the Fediverse)
• Each node can train models locally, then merge or share models with others
• Knowledge and behavior are stored in RDF graphs + code (acting like a blueprint)
• Agents evolve via co-training and mutation, they can switch learning groups and also chose to defederate different parts of the network

This creates something like a digital ecosystem of AI agents, growing across the social web; with nodes being able to freely train their models, which indirectly results in shared models moving across the network in comparison to siloed models of current federated learning.

My question: Is this kind of architecture - blending self-replicating AI agents, federated learning, and social protocols like ActivityPub - feasible and scalable in practice? Or are there fundamental barriers (technical, theoretical, or social) that would limit it?

I started to realize this using an architecture with four micro-services for each node (frontend, backend, knowledge graph using fuseki jena and activitypub-communicator); however, it brings my local laptop to its limits even with 8 nodes.

The question could also be stated differently: how much compute would be necessary to trigger non trivial behaviours that can generate some value to sustain the overall system?

MyceliumWebServer: running 8 fungus nodes locally to train AI models (communication happens via ActivityPub)

In the graphic, every purple node is a running music recommendation service. They can collaborate in teams to together train AI models (the orange nodes). The communication happens over ActivityPub...

MakerTube (makertube.net)

Von Neumann’s idea of self-replicating automata describes machines that can reproduce themselves given a blueprint and a suitable environment. I’m exploring a concept that tries to apply this idea to AI in a modern context:

• AI agents (or “fungus nodes”) that run on federated servers
• They communicate via ActivityPub (used in Mastodon and the Fediverse)
• Each node can train models locally, then merge or share models with others
• Knowledge and behavior are stored in RDF graphs + code (acting like a blueprint)
• Agents evolve via co-training and mutation, they can switch learning groups and also chose to defederate different parts of the network

This creates something like a digital ecosystem of AI agents, growing across the social web; with nodes being able to freely train their models, which indirectly results in shared models moving across the network in comparison to siloed models of current federated learning.

My question: Is this kind of architecture - blending self-replicating AI agents, federated learning, and social protocols like ActivityPub - feasible and scalable in practice? Or are there fundamental barriers (technical, theoretical, or social) that would limit it?

I started to realize this using an architecture with four micro-services for each node (frontend, backend, knowledge graph using fuseki jena and activitypub-communicator); however, it brings my local laptop to its limits even with 8 nodes.

The question could also be stated differently: how much compute would be necessary to trigger non trivial behaviours that can generate some value to sustain the overall system?

MyceliumWebServer: running 8 fungus nodes locally to train AI models (communication happens via ActivityPub)

In the graphic, every purple node is a running music recommendation service. They can collaborate in teams to together train AI models (the orange nodes). The communication happens over ActivityPub...

MakerTube (makertube.net)

I think everyone thought of what you described, but most lacked mind discipline to think in specifics.

That's all I wanted to say, very cool, good luck.

(I personally would prefer thinking of a distributed computer (tasks distributed among members of a group with some redundancy and a graph of execution dependencies, results merged, so the initial state a node retrieves only once), but I lack knowledge of fundamentals.)

Train them to do what?

Your bottleneck will probably be communication speed if you want any kind of performance in a reasonable time. Small nodes will have to communicate a lot of little data a lot, big nodes will have to communicate bigger data even if it's more refined.

I love how casually you just dropped this .

I'm working on something similar but it's not ready for it's FOSS release yet.

Feel free to message me if you wanna discuss ideas.