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?

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.