In this work, we seek to optimize the efficiency of secure general-purpose obfuscation schemes. We focus on the problem of optimizing the obfuscation of Boolean formulas and branching programs -- this corresponds to optimizing the "core obfuscator" from the work of Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai, and Waters (FOCS 2013), and all subsequent works constructing general-purpose obfuscators. This core obfuscator builds upon approximate multilinear maps, where efficiency in proposed instantiations is closely tied to the maximum number of "levels" of multilinearity required.