High praise from Willison on Anthropic’s new multi-agent research system:
I’ve been pretty skeptical of these until recently: why make your life more complicated by running multiple different prompts in parallel when you can usually get something useful done with a single, carefully-crafted prompt against a frontier model?
By splitting the research into segments and serializing the work, Anthropic’s team improved the completed research but burned through a lot of tokens. Like much frontier AI work, it’s fascinating … and expensive.