OpenAI ran a public ML hiring competition this spring called Parameter Golf: train the best small language model under a strict size and compute budget. 1,016 researchers entered. They filed 2,048 pull requests over 44 days. Only 47 made the official leaderboard. The single most prolific contributor wasn't a person. It was an autonomous research agent named Aiden: 7 of the 47 records came from it, more than 2x the next-best human (3 records). It ran for 22 days straight with no human steering,...