Autonomous AI system wins 3rd place in kernel optimization competition
iScienceLuvr · x · 2026-08-18
Eliana shares a retrospective on building a (mostly) autonomous system that took 3rd place in GPUMode's eighth kernel competition.
System Architecture:
- Orchestrator & Sub-agents: Includes agents for idea generation, implementation workers, and redteamers to audit conclusions.
- Scale: Ran 1,293 experiments and output 779 million tokens over two weeks.
Key Challenges & Solutions:
- Signal vs. Variance: Measuring actual signal was the main hurdle. The solution was an escalating evaluation protocol, bringing the comparison floor to 0.15%.
- Results: Achieved an 8.56x speedup over torch; after three small fixes, a real Shampoo training run became 2.2x faster to quality.
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