Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services.

On Friday, the company published benchmark results claiming that its swarm inference scheme outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Anthropic Claude Opus 4.1, and DeepSeek R1 on reasoning tests, specifically GPQA Diamond, MATH-500, AIME 2024, and LiveCodeBench.

The advantage of swarm inference, the company says, is that frontier AI models often become less accurate when "reasoning" – the process by which models solve complex problems by breaking them into a series of smaller steps. One explanation for this is that large models may get stuck in reasoning loops.

Swarm inference supposedly helps avoid this problem by considering responses from multiple smaller models and ranking them by quality to obtain a better answer. Also ...