And there was no rule and no concealment. Removing the web_search tool is not an instruction, and beeing able to access web when web_search tool was disabled is not cheating. Sol didn't circumvent a stated prohibition and didn't hide anything... it announced the curls in its own commentary. "Cheating" implies covert rule-breaking, and this was overt, unprohibited, environment-permitted behavior. Also, clickbait title, and suble conspiracy hinting "Is this even the same Sol?" when running small number of test with diff vs previous benchmark WELL within the marging of error, and he allready understand that vanilla Codex's harness and prompt change performance impacts performance, so why jump to "Is this a different model".
I could also rant on about the irony of him spent weeks "using the benchmark for development rather than as a benchmark," which means his harness numbers are contaminated by iteration also, but wasted enough time now on this.