Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of Gemini 3. In this conversation at NeurIPS, YC's Francois Chaubaurd sat down with Poetiq co-founder Ian Fisher to find out how they're increasing performance using prompts and system design alone. They also explore recursive self-improvement, benchmarking progress toward AGI, and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today.

Chapters
00:11 — Introducing Poetiq and the ARC-AGI Breakthrough
00:49 — How Big Is the Performance Jump?
01:18 — Ian Fisher’s Background: YC, Google, DeepMind
02:00 — Recursive Self-Improvement Explained
03:00 — Why Poetiq Targeted ARC-AGI
03:58 — Improving Models Without Access to Weights
04:26 — Ensembles, Voting, and System-Level Optimization
05:30 — Why Gemini 3 Changed Everything
06:21 — What’s Next: Benchmarks, Research, and Customers
07:14 — Is Recursive Self-Improvement a Path to AGI?
08:46 — When to Stop Hill-Climbing
09:16 — Automating Prompt Engineers and Agents