Every meaningful thing we do at work... brainstorming, decision making, debating involves multiple people. Yet look around: each and every AI tool that you use today forces a one-on-one turn taking interaction that doesn't map to how collaboration in your life happens.
And yet for all the talk of agentic coworkers, what we have now is much better delegation, not genuine participation.
But I'm quite confident that in group dynamics humans will not actually want equal agent participation. Its hard to image at this moment an agent piping up during the flow of a lively discussion or heated debate and not immediately being squelched.
What we certainly do want now is the ability to collaborate with each other's agent, make context explicit for it and ensure we can all build shared "mental models".
And so a lot of latent pain is wrapped up in the missing Multiplayer Mode for today's AI. And the reason its not everywhere yet is because its a socio-technical problem and its hard to conceive what it should look like.
Where do you put it? In a group chat thread? How does it work? What’s the shape of the thing?
What I mean, is, that most “computing experiences” are by definition personal. There isn’t yet a shared substrate to build Multiplayer AI on. Your cursor is yours. Your chat is yours. Your context, yours. And it dies with the tab.
Before computers, makers had workshops. Writers had smoke-filled rooms with typewriters you could hear across the hall. Musicians have studios. Every discipline that ever made anything has had a place where that making happened. A place everyone could see and reach at once.
The Greeks had a word for this.
A stoa. A covered walkway where people gathered to think together. Zeno taught philosophy in one. The whole school was named after the building. Not a curriculum. Not a founder. A place.
Because for two and a half thousand years we understood something we seem to have forgotten: the room precedes the idea. You don’t get to truly refined thought without a place to hold it. You don’t get to a decision without a surface to sketch it on. And you sure as hell don’t get to a thing a ton of people want without a space where many hands can touch it at once.
So what is the shape of multiplayer AI?
It is not just a group chat with a bot in it. That is relay, dressed up.
It is not just shared document with an agent scribbling in the margin.
Its not just Zoom with extra note taking apparatus that replace Granola. No, that’s just copying.
The shape is a room. A space with walls and a floor and your people and your agents all invited. A place where the conversation is the artifact. Where a decision made at minute six is captured before minute seven. Where the agent you summoned can see what everyone else sees and hear what was just said. Where the thing you’re building is right there “on the wall” alongside the reason you’re building it.
👉 And its why we think makers will meet https://withstoa.com
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