Toby Ord re-draws OpenAI's swarm scaling data: 4x agents cost ~2x tokens
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-22
Researcher Toby Ord re-analyzed OpenAI's multi-agent swarm scaling graphs, which lacked a clean control fixing CoT length while scaling agent count. By re-plotting with a log x-axis and joining points with equal tokens-per-agent, he shows all swarm sizes scale logarithmically with the same slope, and every 4x increase in agents costs roughly 2x total tokens.
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