Anyone who has experience with ML wouldn’t be surprised by that. Oftentimes ML competitions are about combining dozens of models together to juice the extra 0.0

Anyone who has experience with ML wouldn’t be surprised by that. Oftentimes ML competitions are about combining dozens of models together to juice the extra 0.01%—something that isn’t viable in a production environment as the quote in the article confirms. AFAIK, modern ML challenges try to combat that by moving from answer-only submissions to code submissions and putting constraints on compute.