EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)25 Sep

“Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord

Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?

We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:

1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched a sophisticated criminal attack on the AI company Hugging Face.
A swarm of 10,000 agents solved a version of the longstanding Navier-Stokes problem in mathematics. It took them just 88 hours to do so, in which time they sent 5 million messages to each other and used 300 billion tokens.

No doubt we will soon see even larger swarms with even more impressive capabilities. But they are not cheap. It is estimated that the swarm of 10,000 agents cost about 20 million dollars at API prices. So while they are very powerful, it will be some time before we see the million-fold reduction in cost needed for this level of power to [...]

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Outline:

(02:14) HOW DO SWARMS SCALE?

(08:44) IMPLICATIONS

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First published:
September 21st, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EkaBCQwL5hhTtxEwR/swarm-scaling

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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