S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

I found the discussion around inference scaling with the 'Wait' hack so surreal. The fact such an ingeniously simple method can impact performance makes me wonder how many low-hanging fruit we're still missing. So weird to think that improvements on a branch of computer science is boiling down to conjuring the right incantation words, how you even change your mindset to start thinking this way?

> a branch of computer science

It should be considered a distinct field. At some level there is overlap (information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, etc.), but prompt optimization and model distillation is far removed from computability, formal language theory, etc. The analytical methods, the techniques to create new architectures, etc. are very different beasts.