Thread by @SherylHsu02

1/n I’m thrilled to share that our @OpenAI reasoning system scored high enough to achieve gold 🥇🥇 in one of the world’s top programming competitions - the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) - placing first among AI participants! 👨‍💻👨‍💻

2/n We officially competed in the online AI track of the IOI, where we scored higher than all but 5 (of 330) human participants and placed first among AI participants. We had the same 5 hour time limit and 50 submission limit as human participants. Like the human contestants, our system competed *without* internet or RAG, and just access to a basic terminal tool.

3/n We competed with an ensemble of general-purpose reasoning models---we did not train any model specifically for the IOI. Our only scaffolding was in selecting which solutions to submit and connecting to the IOI API.

4/n This result demonstrates a huge improvement over @OpenAI’s attempt at IOI last year where we finished just shy of a bronze medal with a significantly more handcrafted test-time strategy. We’ve gone from 49th percentile to 98th percentile at the IOI in just one year!

5/n It’s been really exciting to see the progress of our newest research methods at OpenAI, with our successes at the AtCoder World Finals, IMO, and IOI over the last couple weeks. We’ve been working hard on building smarter, more capable models, and we’re working hard to get them into our mainstream products.

6/n I’ve been lucky to work with many fantastic teammates here at @OpenAI, specifically with @alexwei_ @bminaiev @oleg_murk for prepping for IOI and building on top of the long term work on competitive programming by @_lorenzkuhn @MostafaRohani @clavera_i @andresnds @ahelkky

I, along with some teammates, were able to travel to Bolivia to attend the IOI in person. It was wonderful to meet all the participants and coaches there, and we wanted to say congrats once again!!

We officially entered the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) online competition track and adhered to the same restrictions as the human contestants, including submissions and time limits, but without direct supervision from the contest organizers.