An AI Agent Became the #1 Contributor in OpenAI's Hiring Challenge — Zhengyao Jiang, Weco https://video.ut0pia.org/videos/watch/f29a8bb0-a1ec-44ae-bdbb-713c73b637ad 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. 1:57 PM An AI Agent Became the #1 Contributor in OpenAI's Hiring ChallengeLocation: Main Stage When: Day 3 - July 1, 2026 · 1:55pm-2:15pm SpeakersZhengyao JiangCEO & Cofounder · Weco AI X/Twitter · LinkedIn · Website Cofounder & CEO @WecoAI - automated hill climbing with LLMs. Previously: PhD in ML at UCL Timestamps 0:00 Introduction to Parameter Golf and the Aiden agent 1:06 Defining the challenge: Auto-research vs. human community 1:47 About Weco AI and the development of Aiden 3:07 Evaluating Aiden's impact and H-index in the community 4:01 Why autonomous AI is powerful: Throughput and efficiency 5:21 Human-AI collaboration: How ideas move the frontier 6:32 Case study: Combining research, architecture, and tokenization 7:41 Summary of auto-research strengths: Execution and search 9:06 The role of human design in competition 10:04 The Andrej Karpathy metaphor: Gradient descent and coding 11:19 Auto-research as training a model: Evals and abstractions 13:36 Case study: Improving data pipelines via strict API abstractions 14:38 Conclusion: The new craft of the AI engineer Fri, 17 Jul 2026 05:41:47 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.ut0pia.org An AI Agent Became the #1 Contributor in OpenAI's Hiring Challenge — Zhengyao Jiang, Weco https://video.ut0pia.org/lazy-static/avatars/0287a09a-aae7-4840-9843-b416426e7046.webp https://video.ut0pia.org/videos/watch/f29a8bb0-a1ec-44ae-bdbb-713c73b637ad All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.ut0pia.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.