Evidence of Exceptional Ability

My work on ARC-AGI

Public stuff

I built a tiny transformer that scores 44% on ARC-AGI, trained from scratch in just 67 cents.

This is the best non-LLM method in the world
Also the cheapest, and trains the fastest by far (new pareto frontier)
Beats every single non-thinking LLM and many thinking ones
Least # of params at this performance
Went viral on X, got the attention of top AI researchers (many thought the result to be impossible initially)

All the posts about my work on X: https://x.com/evilmathkid/highlights
More details in Blogs: 44% on ARC-AGI 1, A New Pareto Frontier on ARC-AGI.
Code (open source): https://github.com/mvakde/mdlARC

Private stuff

Since then, I have doubled the score again and saturated ARC-1.
Now working on v2 of the benchmark, currently at 21% (beats GPT-5 Pro).
I expect to beat the WR (40%) in 2 weeks.
Winner of v2 gets $425K (spoiler: its gonna be me)

New pareto on arc — Current verified ARC-2 score on private leaderboard on kaggle

Why ARC? Its a famous metalearning benchmark. Easy for humans, hard for AI models, including LLMs. The benchmark’s been open since 2019 and despite a heavy cash prize, no substantial progress was made till thinking LLMs in 2024. I showed that vanilla transformers were good enough to make the same progress at OOMs less effort

Achievements

Invited to Team India selection & training camp (International Olympiad in Astronomy & Astrophysics)
NIUS fellowship by Tata Institute of Fundamental research, 2021
Top 25 in India - Indian National Astronomy Olympiad 2018
Ranked 324 all India in KVPY. Got the fellowship twice in 2018 & 2019.
Ranked 1500 in JEE Advanced, out of 0.9 million starting candidates (I did this without studying much, while most others who qualified studied for years)
Top 300 all India, National Standard Exam in Astronomy
Runner up, IBM teen hackathon (I was in 9th grade, everyone else in 12th grade)

Career deets

Education

B.Tech @ IIT Bombay, 2023 Majored in Engineering Physics

Work Ex

1. Founding team, GetCrux (YC W24)

Led the project on automated insights for performance marketers. Was a backend dev and product manager on other projects.

2. Research Intern, University of Paris Saclay

Found a correlation b/w DNA content & light absorption while analysing UV images of viruses. Did a bunch of physics experiments on RNA/protein mixtures

3. Intern, New ventures arm @ Tata

Evaluated business models / industry research for Deeptech investments. Regularly presented to senior leadership of Tata Industries and other companies

Mithil Vakde