Toby Ord: Opus 5.5 system card yields lambda values matching OpenAI's agent parallelism estimates

tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-30

Toby Ord points out that Anthropic's new Opus 5.5 System Card can be used to back out λ values for AI task parallelism, alongside OpenAI's published figures.

He reports getting values similar to OpenAI's for all tasks except one — generating a knowledge base — where λ ≈ 1, since the card states the task was simply cut into 100 pieces with each agent doing one, yielding no parallelism gains.

Related event: Toby Ord Discusses Estimating the Lambda Parameter for AI Task Parallelization(2 posts)→

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