  We investigate the swampland distance conjecture in higher-spin gravity. To
this end, we study multicritical generalizations of large-$N$ vector models,
bosonic and fermionic, and we compute the quantum information distance along
selected renormalization-group trajectories toward the higher-spin limit. In
striking contrast to the expected exponential decay of higher-spin masses or
anomalous dimensions, we find that infinite-distance limits in these models
lead to a power-like decay. This suggests that stringy exponential decays are
characteristic of matrix-like gauge theories, rather than vector models. We
corroborate this notion studying the information distance along coupling
variations in Chern-Simons-matter CFTs, where matrix-like degrees of freedom
dominate over vector-like ones.
