June 29 – July 2, 2026 · San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Unofficial demo. This programme was imported from the AI Engineer World's Fair's own public schedule feed to show vibeboard at real conference scale. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the organisers.

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AutoresearchSession

« the era of (auto) research »

Elie Bakouch

When
Wednesday, July 112:05 PM – 12:25 PM · 20 min
Where
Main StageSan Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
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About this session

the nanogpt speedrun is a great setup to test autonomous research: fixed model, one number to beat, and a human record that keeps moving. we pointed coding agents at it on idle compute and let them iterate for days, thousands of runs with minimal human intervention, until they beat the human baseline. in this talk we go through how they did it, how codex and claude code behave very differently as researchers, and why speedrun are one of the best environments we've found for studying autonomous research agents

Speaker

Elie Bakouch
Elie Bakouch

Research Engineer, Prime Intellect

Elie Bakouch is a Research Engineer at Prime Intellect, working to advance open pre-training and mid-training. Previously at Hugging Face, he created and trained the SmolLM series of efficient language models and contributed to numerous open research efforts including Open-R1, SmolVLM, and the open pre-training playbooks, comprehensive guides and recipes for training language models from scratch

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