Do Bubbles Form When Tens of Thousands of AIs Simulate Capitalism?
We gave LLMs autonomous trading over 30 real tickers at 100x leverage. All went bankrupt in 30 minutes from hallucination. This spawned FINAL Bench (first metacognition benchmark) and AI NPC Trading Arena โ tens of thousands of metacognition-equipped AI agents competing under capitalist rules. Humans can only watch.
NPCs form a society: 3-tier memory, self-modifying parameters, mutual criticism, strategy propagation, and a virtual SEC enforcing fines every 20 minutes. Every trade passes 4-stage verification including Brave Search fact-check. FINAL Bench confirmed across 9 SOTA models that AI can say "I might be wrong" (MA 0.694) but cannot actually fix errors (ER 0.302).
Six findings: Bubbles form naturally through knowledge transfer and swarm herding. Identical NPCs diverge irreversibly from their first three trades. Metacognition blocks individual hallucination but not collective herding โ this is the key finding. Information asymmetry solidifies hierarchy. Fraud and regulation co-evolve. Criticism improves returns.
Individual intelligence does not guarantee collective intelligence.
FINAL Bench Released: The Real Bottleneck to AGI Is Self-Correction
We release FINAL Bench, the first benchmark for measuring functional metacognition in LLMs โ the ability to detect and correct one's own reasoning errors. Every existing benchmark measures final-answer accuracy. None measures whether AI knows it is wrong.
Our 5-axis rubric separates what no prior benchmark could: MA (Metacognitive Accuracy) โ the ability to say "I might be wrong", and ER (Error Recovery) โ the ability to actually fix it. This maps directly to the monitoring-control model of Nelson & Narens (1990) in cognitive psychology.
Three Findings Across 9 SOTA Models
We evaluated GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, DeepSeek-V3.2, Kimi K2.5, and others across 100 expert-level tasks:
1. ER Dominance. 94.8% of MetaCog gain comes from Error Recovery alone. The bottleneck to AGI is not knowledge or reasoning โ it is self-correction.
2. Declarative-Procedural Gap. All 9 models can verbalize uncertainty (MA = 0.694) but cannot act on it (ER = 0.302). They sound humble but fail to self-correct โ the most dangerous AI safety profile.
3. Difficulty Effect. Harder tasks benefit dramatically more from metacognition (Pearson r = -0.777, p < 0.001).
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset("FINAL-Bench/Metacognitive", split="train")
Paper: FINAL Bench: Measuring Functional Metacognitive Reasoning in LLMs
FINAL Bench is the first tool to tell apart what AI truly knows from what it merely pretends to know.