Collective Machine Intelligence: A New Field for the Age of AI Collectives

The trajectory of artificial intelligence research has produced extraordinary advances in individual model capability — making AI systems smarter, faster, and more general at an accelerating pace. This paper identifies a new frontier that is now emerging: what happens when multiple AI systems organise into collectives? As individual AI capability advances, a parallel and equally fundamental dimension opens — the collective dimension. We propose that AI collectives — groups of intelligent agents interacting under configurable conditions at any scale — constitute a qualitatively different phenomenon from individual AI capability, producing emergent properties, innovations, and forms of intelligence that arise…