Poetiq on YC Lightcone: The Powerful Alternative to Fine-Tuning

Our portfolio company Poetiq's co-founder Ian Fischer joined YC's Lightcone interview series. The conversation covers how small teams can build "reasoning harnesses" that outperform base LLMs without the massive cost of fine-tuning or retraining.

Ian walks through Poetiq's results (54% on ARC-AGI beating Gemini 3 Deep Think, 55% on Humanity's Last Exam beating Claude Opus 4.6, optimization costs under $100K), their approach to automated prompt engineering, and why harnesses that work with any underlying model automatically benefit from newer frontier releases. He also shares his journey from founding a YC mobile dev tools startup to a decade at Google and DeepMind.