AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Earlier this year, OpenAI ran Parameter Golf, a model-training competition that doubled as a hiring filter. Over 1,000 researchers competed to train the best small language model under a 16MB cap. The top contributor was the one candidate OpenAI couldn't hire. Our autonomous research agent Aiden finished with 7 merged records, more than twice as many as any other contributor, and ended up the most-cited participant in the community.
This talk is about what those 22 days showed. I'll cover on high level how does it works and which of its ideas produced the records. But the part worth more than the leaderboard is the collaboration itself, the community and AI agent building on each other's work, the largest natural experiment in human-AI collaboration I've seen run in public. I'll close with what it tells us about where humans and autonomous research each still matter for the foreseeable future.
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