Swarm scaling is inefficient: matching a 100x token scale-up needs 900x–15000x more agents
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-22
Toby Ord (Oxford) shares estimates converting swarm scaling to thinking-duration scaling: scaling the number of agents in a swarm by 10x yields only 10^λ — about 3x to 5x — of the performance gain from giving one agent 10x more tokens. The shortfall compounds at scale: to match a 100x token scale-up for a single agent, you'd need to grow the swarm by 900x to 15,000x. The implication is that longer thinking by a single agent beats piling up more agents.
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