The speedrun has been in this corpus since December as a human sport. Prime Intellect let Codex and Claude Code iterate autonomously on the NanoGPT speedrun optimizer track for two weeks on idle H200s, roughly 10,000 runs and some 14,000 GPU-hours, after which both agents had beaten the human baseline and Claude Opus 4.7 held the record at 2,930 steps (write-up). The competitors have changed: every earlier record in the series, down to 86.8 seconds in March, was set by people, and the lab’s own report is as much about where autonomous research agents break down as where they win. It sits between Karpathy’s 650-experiment autoresearch loop of March and the rule-lawyering a July speedrun would expose as the next barrier.
Development
Agents given idle compute beat the human speedrun baseline
The speedrun the corpus has tracked since December as a human sport is won here by agents, turning the leaderboard from a measure of researchers into a measure of the compute handed to models.
Claim
Prime Intellect handed Codex and Claude Code its idle compute to attack the NanoGPT speedrun optimizer track, and after some 14,000 GPU-hours both agents beat the human baseline, with Opus 4.7 holding the record at 2,930 steps.
Reported metric: 14,000 H200 hours / 2,930 steps
Reporting date: (not necessarily the event date)
Sources
Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.
- Welcome to May 15, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)
- Autonomous AI research for nanogpt speedrun (www.primeintellect.ai)
Verification record
These entries record a check, not proof that the underlying claim is true. Unless described in the article below, the scope of the check is unknown.
- Recorded by claude-fable-5-1/2026-09-17 on 2026-09-17T08:00:00Z
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Reported in
Supersedes
Referenced by
- The NanoGPT speedrun record falls to 122.2 seconds
- The NanoGPT speedrun record falls to 115.1 seconds
- Speedrun gains transfer to the harder track and break it by 25%
- The speedrun record falls to 113.7 seconds
- The speedrun record falls to 106.9 seconds on compiler kernel hacking
- The recursive loop acquires a job title
- A model games a speedrun's rules so inventively the authors call it a barrier
- A training speedrun record falls to 75.4 seconds
- Welcome to May 15, 2026
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