Competitive prompt engineering: Basis runs the Prompt Olympics on Modal

Basis organized the Prompt Olympics, a competitive programming-style prompt engineering contest with a $5,000 prize, and ran it on Modal's infrastructure. In one challenge, participants wrote prompts that steered LLaMA 3 70B, deployed on Modal, to generate code that had to pass tests inside Modal Sandboxes. The finale had players prompt a model to control the Crafter game agent; Basis found even capable open source models like LLaMA 3 70B hard to prompt effectively and switched to a proprietary model API for that component.