The man-of-war

It looks like a single jellyfish. It is not.

The Portuguese man-of-war is a siphonophore — not one animal but a colony of specialized bodies, each called a zooid. One is grown to be a float and catch the wind; others become tentacles that fish, others digest, others reproduce. No single zooid can live alone. Together, and only together, they are one creature.

That is the shape of zooid AI: many small specialists, each honest about the one thing it can do, alive only as a colony — fanning out, pruning what carries no load, and measuring the flow through whatever survives.