OpenAI has released an experimental educational framework for exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Swarm is managed by the OpenAI Solution team, but is not intended to be used in production and has no official support.

OpenAI is best known for its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence chatbot.

OpenAI says the primary goal of Swarm is to showcase the handoff and routines patterns explored in the Orchestrating Agents: Handoffs & Routines cookbook. It is not meant as a standalone library, and is primarily for educational purposes.

Swarm is designed to use multiple agents that interact statelessly rather than relying heavily on the underlying LLM API. Agent coordination and execution is designed to be lightweight, highly controllable, and easily testable. Agents encompass instructions and tools, and can at any point choose to hand off a conversation to another Agent.

OpenAI points out that Swarm Agents are not related to Assistants in the Assistants API. They are named similarly for convenience, but are otherwise completely unrelated. Swarm is entirely powered by the Chat Completions API and is hence stateless between calls.

Describing Swarm on GitHub, OpenAI says that while Assistants API is a great option for developers looking for fully-hosted threads and built in memory management and retrieval,  Swarm is an educational resource for developers curious to learn about multi-agent orchestration. Swarm runs (almost) entirely on the client and, much like the Chat Completions API, does not store state between calls.

Agent instructions are directly converted into the system prompt of a conversation (as the first message). Only the instructions of the active Agent will be present at any given time. The instructions can either be a regular str, or a function that returns a str. OpenAI says that Swarm's primitives are powerful enough to express rich dynamics between tools and networks of agents, allowing you to build scalable, real-world solutions while avoiding a steep learning curve. They say that Swarm's approach is best suited for situations dealing with a large number of independent capabilities and instructions that are difficult to encode into a single prompt.

Swarm is available in beta now on GitHub.

More Information

OpenAI website

Swarm On GitHub

Related Articles

OpenAI o1 Thinks Before It Answers

OpenAI Announces ChatGPT Canvas

Developers Like Code Assistants Even When They Are Incorrect

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Store

ChatGPT And Excel Another Coding Threat?

Stack Overflow Traffic Slumps As Devs Turn to ChatGPT

Chat GPT 4 - Still Not Telling The Whole Truth

Runaway Success Of ChatGPT

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info