Runpod named OpenAI's infrastructure partner for the Model Craft Challenge Series

Runpod is OpenAI's AI infrastructure partner for the Model Craft Challenge, a new technical competition series for researchers, engineers, and builders working at the frontier of model design. The first challenge, Parameter Golf, launches today and runs through April 30, 2026.

Parameter Golf tasks participants with building the strongest possible language model under strict efficiency constraints: a 16MB artifact limit, a 10-minute training budget on 8xH100s, and evaluation against a public leaderboard. Submissions are made through a GitHub-based workflow, and the challenge is open to anyone.

Runpod and OpenAI are distributing up to $1M in compute credits across the challenge period to help more builders participate, experiment, and push their ideas further. Credits are subject to availability and distributed throughout the challenge period.

Runpod has also built an official challenge template that gives participants a preloaded environment with the challenge repository and Docker image configured, allowing builders to go from credit redemption to running experiments in minutes. H100, H200, and P2-series GPUs are available on the platform for challenge workloads.

"Parameter Golf is exactly the kind of technically demanding, open competition the builder community thrives on," said Zach Gulsby, partnerships lead at Runpod. "Partnering with OpenAI on this lets us put serious compute in the hands of researchers and engineers who are doing genuinely hard work on model efficiency."

Participants can request Runpod credits and access the challenge template at openai.com/parameter-golf. Full challenge details, rules, and submission instructions are available on the OpenAI landing page and GitHub repository.

About Runpod

Runpod is the AI infrastructure platform for developers building and scaling custom AI systems. With Serverless, Pods, and Instant Clusters, Runpod provides a complete platform from first prototype to production scale across 30+ global regions. More than 500,000 developers build on Runpod. Learn more at runpod.io.