Parallel agents are emerging as an important new direction for scaling up AI. AI capabilities have scaled with more training data, training-time compute, and test-time compute. Having multiple agents run in parallel is growing as a technique to further scale and improve performance.
We know from work at Baidu by my former team, and later OpenAI, that AI models’ performance scales predictably with the amount of data and training computation. Performance rises further with test-time compute such as in agentic workflows and in reasoning models that think, reflect, and iterate on an answer. But these methods take longer to produce output. Agents working in parallel offer another path to improve results, without making users wait.
Reasoning models generate tokens sequentially and can take a long time to run. Similarly, most agentic workflows are initially implemented in a sequential way. But as LLM prices per token continue to fall — thus making these techniques practical — and product teams want to deliver results to users faster, more and more agentic workflows are being parallelized.
Some examples:
- Many research agents now fetch multiple web pages and examine their texts in…
test-time compute — Spending more computation when the model answers — thinking longer, trying multiple attempts — to buy accuracy without training a bigger model.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
multi-agent — Using several AI agents on one problem — splitting work in parallel, checking each other, or filling different roles like planner and reviewer.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Why it matters
Reframes AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → latency as a design choice: work that reads as sequential reasoning can often be fanned out, buying quality without making users wait as per-tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → cost falls.
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