A 10,000-researcher agent society that allocates compute by proposal, review and grant reports matching quality with about 30% less compute, though testing labs disagree
The authors propose organizing large populations of autonomous research agents as a society of researchers, in which persistent principal investigators compete for a finite compute pool through calls for proposals, independent review and grants while a human mayor allocates resources and assigns no tasks; in a running deployment of some ten thousand researchers, one lab reported reaching the same quality with about 30% less compute, a result the labs that tested it do not yet agree on.