Poetiq Featured on YC Root Access: Beating Gemini 3 on ARC-AGI

Our portfolio company Poetiq's co-founder Ian Fischer joined YC's Francois Chaubaurd on Root Access at NeurIPS. The conversation covers how Poetiq layered a recursive self-improvement system on top of Gemini 3 to hit 54% on the ARC-AGI private test set, 9-10 percentage points better than Gemini 3 Deep Think while costing half as much.

Ian discusses why recursive self-improvement might be a viable path to AGI without the capital requirements of training bigger models, how Poetiq's six-person team is competing with frontier labs using prompts and system design alone, and what benchmarks like ARC-AGI actually measure about progress toward general intelligence.