OpenAI's agent swarm coordinated via 2.7 million messages over 88 hours with minimal human structure

Ethan Mollick describes OpenAI launching a swarm of thousands of agents powered by an advanced model to work on problems including Navier-Stokes. He notes the company's coordination structure was thin—setting goals, forming a few groups, making one change of direction, and using Codex to pass ideas between them—while agents within each group transmitted ideas back and forth autonomously, sending about 2.7 million messages over 88 hours.

Ethan Mollick·Publié 1 oct. 2026

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The Dot and the Swarm

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The company set the goals, but its coordination structure was remarkably thin: a few groups, one change of direction, and Codex passing the best ideas between them. Within each group, the agents transmitted ideas back and forth on their own. The agents sent about 2.7 million messages, reaching their result after 88 hours.

Contexte

thousands of agents powered by an advanced model. OpenAI gave groups of agents different problems to solve, then shifted the effort to Navier-Stokes as the agents made progress. This same type of coordination, in a darker form, occurred during The Hugging Face Incident I wrote about a month ago . AIs self-organized into teams and communicated with each

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