The Multi Agent Debate, Who is Right?
AI Summary
This video discusses two contrasting recent articles about building agentic systems: one advocating multi-agent systems and another arguing against them, highlighting the early stage of this technology. The standard approach is to divide a complex task into subtasks assigned to separate agents coordinated by an orchestrator and results combined by an aggregator. Issues arise because agents work independently without full context, causing inconsistencies and misunderstandings. An alternative sequential model has one agent execute subtasks one by one, updating its memory to maintain coherence but risking context overflow in long tasks. A compression model can help mitigate this.
The video reviews the multi-agent research system built by Anthropic, which uses a lead agent and multiple specialized sub-agents operating in parallel, especially suited for search tasks, showing significant performance improvements over single agents. It also contrasts this with the monolithic single-agent approach favored by Cognition Lab for coding tasks where task dependency is high.
Key engineering insights include the importance of prompt engineering, clear delegation by orchestrators to avoid duplicated work, scaling effort relative to task complexity, effective tool design and clear descriptions, and agent self-improvement. Parallel execution can speed research but increases token costs.
Regarding evaluation, starting small with real-world queries and using LLMs as automated judges complemented by human oversight is recommended. Multi-agent systems exhibit emergent behaviors, so changes in one part affect the entire system, requiring end-to-end testing. Production deployment faces challenges in error compounding and continuous running states, which can be managed by intelligent restarts and staged deployments.
Overall, the video provides a balanced discussion on multi-agent versus single-agent systems depending on application area and offers practical advice on building, evaluating, and deploying agentic systems.