This was nowhere near the top submission. But even if a solo engineer could get a top kernel, you don't think that having thousands of engineers, infinite tokens, and stronger models than are available to the public would give the labs a significant edge?

hello author here.

yes, it gives labs edge and leads to self-recursive improvement loops.

also i was myself able to finish 7th in a later competition with 2-3 other approaches which are variants of the method discussed in this blog.

in general, having a harness as thin as possible with some problem specific instructions while controlling for context rot is the key.

point i am trying to make is there are a lot of optimisation surface areas possible.

you may notice Kimi, GLM have also started telling how their model is able to optimise it's own inference pipeline

https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

I don't know. That just sounds like throwing money at a problem until it goes away. I'm not convinced that is the correct path forward.

1. labs have lots of inference capacity 2. they will have domain experts working on this so their efficiency is gonna be exponentially more (can direct LLM better, save money, reach same results faster)

You can't exceed roofline performance on hardware. There is an performance cap you can hit. This recursive self improvement stuff lets you be closer to the pareto frontier, but the idea that it is leading to some exponential growth is a total pipe dream.

fair enough

You say this like that isn’t how the vast majority of problems are solved…

Does the edge matter? I know you added significant as your hedge, but once you have feedback, your gain is largely irrelevant. Gain buys you bandwidth, so we are constructing systems run by the most powerful corporations where they are now optimizing for latency, as Archer says, do you want to flash crash civilization? This is how you do it.

That’s not what a moat is =]

Which I believe was the word intended.

Yeah, but here's a dirty little secret that very few people are discussing:

You can't use Claude for this sort of thing if the goal is to make better AI systems. Anthropic finetunes Claude to dissuade people and the agent from using research that actually works. Anything that they use internally in their own models is poisoned, to protect their moat.

By proxy, that also means any openweights model that was distilled from Claude is equally useless for this purpose.

Thankfully, I don't believe OpenAI does this - they are far more honest and seem to care about their reputation. Anthropic is evil though.

> Thankfully, I don't believe OpenAI does this - they are far more honest and seem to care about their reputation.

Bro. Sam Altman?

OpenAI is run by its employees and their culture is far healthier. Unlike Anthropic, they don't have a CEO that actively encourages their employees to be dishonest.

They have lost 12 executives in the past year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/14/open-ai-ipo-red-flag.html

oh: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260527189/sam...