I would imagine Anthropic is hitting a wall on the number of simultaneous agents that can be useful on a task and are working on increasing that maximum.

I would assume if they could get twice as much progress by using 10000 simultaneous running fable instances instead, their brief would state that.

IMO, it is very interesting and also very alarming. At some point the barrier to the exponential progress is the amount of computation available. The average human is limited in the number of 'human instances' he or she can interface with at one time.

if 1000 fable instances is better than any human at a task, how about 1 million instances running? Much easier than finding and hiring and coordinating 1000 extremely productive and intelligent human beings. Much cheaper too, it appears.

We are very close to some very scary things happening. I just recently came to terms with the fact that an AI could code and manage coders faster and better than me, I don't think anyones is ready for what is about to happen.

It depends on the type of task. There was an interview on Dwarkesh with an OpenAI researcher and he said that massive multi-agent swarms can increase capability on some problems that are very parallelizable, but there are diminishing returns. But not all tasks can be parallelized like that.

Where it gets scary is the fact that efficiency is going up 10x per year, so the cost of running 1000 agents will cost the same as running 1 agent in 3 years if the trend holds.