An AI outscored every human at the International Olympiad in Informatics
The International Olympiad in Informatics has run every year since 1989. Four teenagers per country, picked through national contests, two days, five hours a day, six problems. This year the highest score in the room did not belong to a teenager.
NVIDIA entered a model called Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B. It scored 535.4 out of 600. The best human competitor scored 498.27. The bar for a gold medal, which about one contestant in twelve clears, was 361.12.
Why this one is different
Machines have scored well on IOI problems before, but afterwards: on problems already published, with as much time as the researchers wanted to give them. This one ran during the contest itself, on the same five hour clock, under the same limit on submissions and the same rules about what it could look up, before the problems were public anywhere. The claim in the paper is deliberately narrow. First time an AI has outscored the top human on an IOI problem set.
Four years, from the middle of the pack to first place.
How we got here
- 2022DeepMind's AlphaCode reached the median competitor on Codeforces, around the top 54%. The first time an AI was competitive at this at all.
- 2023AlphaCode 2 solved 1.7 times as many problems and beat roughly 85% of entrants.
- 2024OpenAI entered o1-ioi live at the IOI and finished in the 49th percentile. It could reach gold, but only with hand written strategies and relaxed limits. Its successor o3 then reached gold on the same problems without either.
- 2025Open weight models reached the gold threshold too, so the capability stopped being something only a frontier lab could rent you.
- 2026535.4 against 498.27. First place.
What it does and does not mean
Start with what it does not show. An IOI problem is the friendliest shape a task can have for a machine: self contained, precisely specified, scored automatically, with a correct answer fixed before anyone starts. Almost no real engineering looks like that. This result says nothing about choosing which problem is worth solving, working from a specification that turns out to be wrong, or writing code a colleague has to maintain for five years. What it does show is narrower and still large: for problems that can be stated exactly, the ceiling has moved above the best human alive, and it moved there in four years.