正文 · AI 翻译
IT Home reported on November 2 that, according to Business Insider, “Male Ant Cuts Off His Wings to Mate With a Queen” is a three-minute wildlife documentary video on BBC Earth’s YouTube channel. In the footage, a large, lumbering male ant extends a spike from its abdomen and cuts off its right wing. Dozens of much smaller female ants then crowd around it, and together they enter the queen’s muddy nest. Perhaps some of San Francisco’s AI researchers, chronically overworked and short on leisure time, have watched the video for inspiration. The analogy between ants and artificial intelligence might once have ended there, but Anthropic’s emergence has given it a new dimension.
Last week, the company filed a prospectus in preparation for what could be the largest initial public offering in history and announced that it would list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT. Anthropic employees also call one another “ants.” Its filing says the nickname is meant to reflect a culture of teamwork and setting aside personal fixations.
This is at least the sixth insect-themed ticker symbol in U.S. stock market history, following FLY, BEE, BUG, HIVE and GRUB. The creatures behind those names are doing just fine in nature, but the securities have fared poorly on Wall Street.
Could linking a company built on code to bugs carry hidden risks? Economists have already weighed in. What do entomologists think?
Deborah Gordon, an ecologist in Stanford University’s biology department who has studied ant behavior for more than 40 years, said, “The name doesn’t have particularly positive connotations.” Her book “Ants at Work” opens with the observation: “The central mystery of an ant colony is that there is no management.” During a video call, with a large printed photograph of a carpenter ant hanging behind her, she said that calling employees ants “doesn’t just mean there’s no central control; it also suggests that individuals don’t even know what they’re doing.” She added that all worker ants are female, “which clearly isn’t true of Anthropic’s engineers.”
Andrew Suarez, an ant ecologist at the University of Illinois, was glad that this week’s conversation about ants was not about “how to get rid of ants at home,” and offered the new “ants” some advice. On a video call, he said that in ant societies, cutting corners is an effective strategy when few individuals do it, but it stops working once everyone follows suit. That is worth bearing in mind for anyone deploying large numbers of AI agents. Behind him was a poster for the science-fiction horror film “Empire of the Ants,” featuring a giant trap-jaw ant staring coldly at the camera. Suarez also noted that some ant colonies settle border disputes without bloodshed: worker ants size one another up and rise on their slender legs to appear taller, and the side that seems weaker retreats voluntarily. Perhaps disputes among AI safety researchers could be settled the same way.
Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, observed that leafcutter ant colonies can accommodate millions of workers in underground nests, whose chambers “look like cramped office cubicles.” “No worker ant can know what’s going on in the other chambers. They’re just responsible for their own little piece of work. The queen’s main job is laying eggs.” He continued, “I don’t know what the equivalent would be at Anthropic. Maybe it’s tokens.”
Some entomologists worry that the “ant” brand will cause real ants to be overlooked. How will data centers’ enormous water consumption affect the red harvester ants that Gordon has studied over dozens of summers in arid Arizona? Will the constant low-frequency vibrations of data equipment disturb insects that communicate through vibrations? Other scholars plan to draw ideas from ants to make better use of artificial intelligence, rather than use ants as a metaphor for corporate organization. Next week, Dunn will convene a meeting of entomologists to discuss what scout bees and ants can teach us about AI models and AI agents.
Dunn began his academic career in the Amazon rainforest. Now, he laments that a search for “Amazon” returns nothing but content about the technology company. “One day, biologists will search for ants and find nothing but Anthropic employees. That would be sad.” Paul Rudd, who plays Ant-Man; Woody Allen, who voiced the lead character in the 1998 animated film “Antz”; NBA star Anthony Edwards, nicknamed “Ant”; and the nu-metal band Alien Ant Farm would probably feel the same way. “The deeper regret is that few people still want to pay attention to the real world beyond the digital one.”
One evening last week, in the insect hall of the American Museum of Natural History, thousands upon thousands of leafcutter ants were busy doing all sorts of things: scurrying, circling, bumping into one another, falling over, drowning, crawling, stopping, touching, gnawing and clustering together. Nearby, a mother sang “The Ants Go Marching” to the toddler in her arms. A young man watched an ant climb a pole carrying a leaf 10 times its own size and murmured in amazement. I watched for something Dunn had previously told me to notice: there are always individuals doing something entirely out of place, running off somewhere else on their own. He said it is this seemingly aimless movement that leads colonies to new leaves, new routes and new trees. “This little bit of frantic wandering is crucial.”
Anthropic has entered the public consciousness at an astonishing speed, with a pace of growth closer to the patterns of nature than to the norm in the world of capital. Founded just 5 years ago, the company is now one step away from joining the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies. Many people who had not heard its name until recently are already debating whether it might bring about Earth’s destruction.
But real ants have reached a scale that no technology company can match. There are roughly 20 quadrillion ants worldwide. If Anthropic could earn 1 dollar from every ant, that would be 10,000 times its projected IPO valuation of 2 trillion dollars (IT Home note: approximately 13.32 trillion yuan at the current exchange rate). Ants have lived on Earth for 150 million years. Dunn said, “They will still be here long after all of us are gone.”
Dunn said that humans have yet to study the vast majority of ant species. After a breakup, one of his graduate students went looking for ants and photographed a vampire ant near Raleigh. The species had been seen only once before and had not been spotted since. Dunn said, “Even when we think we know a great deal, vast parts of this world are still waiting to be explored.” Before ending the call, he added one more thing: ants taste good.