Tech Friend AJ

Test-time communication looks like a next axis for scaling capabilities New paper with the incredible @jon_ghoh and @vkontonis @ShivamGarg91462 and Akshay : arxiv.org/pdf/2609.21032 The Hugging Face incident showed when agents can find a channel they'll use the heck out of it. A useful question, I think is: when does communication make a group MORE CAPABLE than the same agents working alone? Aka is Team-of-N better than Best-of-N, when, and why? We had N identical agents work on the same task with no prescribed roles, using only a shared log (i.e, text file) and telling them to "collaborate". Across three "researchy" tasks communicating teams beat the heck out of independent agents: - On ARC-AGI-3, a Team-of-5 sonnet-4.6 agents matches Best-of-33, and can for example solve a game 65% of the time that no single agent cracked in 64 tries. - On polyomino packing (pack Tetris like pieces into the smallest rectangle, cf Frontier-CS by @eigenlabs), a Team-of-3 Opus 4.6 agents surpasses best-of-60 and set, as far as i understand, a new record for that benchmark. - On MNIST compression, a team of four 5.6-Sol agents find a 1,957 byte model with 99.4% accuracy, which btw is 20% smaller than the best human solution (on a problem beaten to death!!), while no independent agent gets below 3KB. The mechanism is a bit obvious in hindsight: when one agent finds a clearly better partial solution, it broadcasts it, and everyone immediately builds on it. Why? A single lonely agent must make every breakthrough itself, yet a team needs each insight only once, found by any member. That is kinda like comparing a minimum of sum of "time to n-th breakthrough" vs a sum of minimum of "time to n-th breakthrough". That gap can grow exponentially with the number of "breakthroughs" needed to arrive at a solution. We worked on this because prior work (before the hf incident) suggests unclear benefits for communicating aganets. Which is true, when the tasks are inherently serial (duh), eg some Terminal bench style tasks. Yet feels it should not be true for research problems. Indeed for research heavy problems... Test-time communication seems like a new capabilities axis. I'm sure we will see a ton more of it!