Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmapped Maya pyramid in 72h

Re:Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmap... by reedf1 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @08:37AM (#50453263)

Seriously though, why 48 AI Agents? I'm curious, presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis so its not raw parallelism? Do the agents share work? This kind of agent scale is outside of my budget, I would love to know the details.

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Re:Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmap... by blitzar on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @08:39AM (#50453286)

1 Ai agent to search the Lidar; 47 to screw in the lightbulb

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Re:Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmap... by shawabawa3 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @08:51AM (#50453419)

Well they had to look at lidar images from huge parts of Mexico. Seeing as 48 agents did it in 72 hours, presumably 1 agent would do it in 144 days.

Simple to enough to ask "how long would it take", see 144 days and reply "do it in 3 days" and the agent will happily spin up enough instances to cover it

edit: "presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis"

No, they said they didn't analyse with tool use it was literally agents "looking" at the images via multimodal input

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Re:Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmap... by reedf1 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @09:12AM (#50453663)

Even if it was a confirmed agent-orchestrator pattern, it would still be interesting to know the details.

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