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Poetiq Justice

Poetiq, a less-than-one-year-old A.I. startup just crushed the ARC A.G.I. benchmark, beating Anthropic and Google with only six people and $40,000. An exclusive look inside the search for an A.I. holy grail.

Poetic AI founders
Poetiq—founded last year by Shumeet Baluja (left) and Ian Fischer (right), former A.I. researchers at Google DeepMind who have been working together for over a decade—just achieved one of the highest scores ever recorded on the gold-standard ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, beating out Anthropic, Google, and all but one of OpenAI’s attempts. Photo: Courtesy of Poetiq
Ian Krietzberg
January 29, 2026

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Most early-stage A.I. companies focus on a handful of similar tasks: training and fine-tuning L.L.M.s, developing specialized models, buying G.P.U.s, etcetera. Poetiq—founded last year by Shumeet Baluja and Ian Fischer, former A.I. researchers at Google DeepMind who have been working together for over a decade—doesn’t do any of those things. Nevertheless, the startup just achieved one of the highest scores ever recorded on the gold-standard ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, beating out Anthropic, Google, and all but one of OpenAI’s attempts. They also pulled it off in just six months, with a six-person team, and a total hardware bill of only $40,000.