> Using a tired analogy, 9 pregnant women won't deliver a baby in a month.

That analogy only applies to tasks with similar characteristics. Is running a computer program the same as gestating a baby?

Also I don't think this a case where they distributed the task to speed it up, but rather their goal was to compromise speed to make it runnable.

I fail to see the relevance. The researchers already demonstrated such sharding. https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai