What is OpenAI's Parameter Golf Challenge, and why I spent a month on it

March 18th, 2026. OpenAI posts the rules for something called Parameter Golf. Train the best language model that fits in a 16MB artifact and trains in under 10 minutes on 8xH100s. I read it twice and almost closed the tab. I trained a GAN a long time ago. I'd picked up transformer basics here and there. I had never trained a language model. I had never rented a GPU by the hour. Every word in the announcement was slightly beyond my reach. I decided to try anyway. A month later, my submission is o