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Ian Fischer

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Poetiq

Search every verified Ian Fischer interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ian Fischer, co-founder and co-CEO of Poetiq, discussed the company's work on recursively self-improving AI systems in a February 2026 podcast appearance. He described Poetiq's core technology as a "meta system" that automates the generation of systems for solving hard problems, positioning it as a faster and cheaper alternative to fine-tuning or hiring teams to build custom agents. Fischer noted that the approach can improve on existing models and cited a recent result on the "Humanity's last exam" benchmark, stating that Poetiq achieved 55%, which he said was nearly two percentage points higher than a prior state-of-the-art score from Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. Fischer also offered general advice on working with AI, encouraging people to experiment with the technology daily and to build things they imagine. He mentioned using GPT-5 over a weekend to create an iPhone app, his first such development effort in a decade, as an example of the current speed and ease of AI-assisted development.

Recent appearances

  • The Powerful Alternative To Fine-Tuning

    February 27, 2026 · 📺 Y Combinator

    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 existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today. Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 00:40 – What Is Poetiq? 01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained 02:07 – The Fine-Tuning T…

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  • Poetiq - Ian Fischer (CEO) | Stanford Hidden Layer Podcast #104

    December 11, 2025 · 📺 Stanford MLSys Seminars

    Ian Fischer (CEO Poetiq) - Ian, Shumeet, and the rest of the 6 person Poetiq team just achieved SOTA results on ARC-AGI2 with their Recursive Self-Improvement technique, beating all frontier labs with billions of spend and compute. Before founding Poetiq, Ian was a prolific researcher at Deepmind publishing some of the most influential information theoretic deep learning papers in the community. We go deep into Ian's personal life, how he got into AI, the founding of Poetiq, the ARC-AGI results, and what is needed to close the gap to achieve AGI. Francois Chaubard (ex-CEO/Founder Focal Syste…

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