The path to artificial superintelligence

The artificial intelligence industry is shifting its focus from vertically scaled, powerful individual models to horizontally scaled, collaborative multi-agent systems. While large models have advanced reasoning capabilities, enabling individual agents to perceive, reason, and act, the next frontier lies in enabling these agents to coordinate and "think" together across different systems and platforms. This collaborative approach is crucial for solving complex problems that no single agent can tackle alone.

Cisco’s Outshift is addressing this challenge with its “Internet of Cognition” and “Internet of Agents” initiatives. The Internet of Agents provides a connectivity layer allowing autonomous agents to discover each other, verify identities, and exchange messages. Building upon this, the Internet of Cognition adds a semantic layer, facilitating shared intent, context, and reasoning among agents. This architecture is seen as a vital step toward distributed artificial superintelligence, enabling a team of agents to converge on and solve novel problems autonomously.

Existing multi-agent systems have shown limitations, with high failure rates in coordinating complex tasks. This is primarily an architectural gap, not a prompting issue. The lack of a proper coordination layer prevents agents from holding common goals and reasoning toward solutions they weren't individually trained for. Outshift’s open-source project, AGNTCY, provided under the Linux Foundation, aims to be the foundational connectivity layer allowing agents across diverse systems to interact through open, standardized protocols.

Three key pillars support this collective agent intelligence: shared intent through cognition state protocols like Outshift’s Mycelium, shared context through a cognition fabric that acts as a cumulative institutional memory, and shared reasoning via cognitive amplifiers and guardrail technologies (GATs). GATs, such as Outshift’s Continuous Agent Semantic Authorization (CASA), are critical for ensuring secure, compliant, and continuously authorized agent actions, addressing the new risks associated with agent autonomy at machine speed and scale. This evolution mirrors human development from scattered individuals to civilization, emphasizing the power of collective intelligence.