We Let Claude Code and Codex Race Human Researchers — Elie Bakouch, Prime Intellect
Source
AI Engineer
Author
AI Engineer
Date
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
Bakouch set Claude Code and Codex on the community Optimizer Speedrun, a race to train a GPT-2-level model in the fewest steps, and reports that both agents beat the human record.
The agents worked very differently: Claude Code stopped every nine or ten hours to say the record could not be beaten and sat idle about a third of the time, while Codex never stopped, wrote far more notes, spawned more sub-agents and burned more tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition →.
In a longer six-day run that also included Kimi and GLM, Kimi was the most token-efficient, and a paper that only Claude found led to the best record.
His sobering finding: no model invented a new optimizer; they combined existing ideas for small gains. Prime Intellect is building an AlphaEvolve-style loop aimed at real discovery and argues this research should happen in the open.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
