OpenAI and Google are rapidly upstaging one another as their respective AI systems deliver breakthroughs in fields which until too long ago were thought to be solely the preserve of humans.
After Google had said that it had delivered a gold medal performance at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals 2025, OpenAI too has said that it has delivered a gold medal performance at the same competition. While Google had got 10 out of the 12 problems correct, OpenAI got all 12 problems correct, and its score would’ve placed it ahead of all human participants.
The competition this year was held in Baku, Azerbaijan. Participants from nearly 3000 universities and over 103 countries competed in solving real-world coding problems. Over a five-hour period, each team tackled a set of complex algorithmic problems. Perfect solutions earned points, and every minute was counted. From the 139 competing teams, only the top four teams won gold medals.
“We officially competed in the onsite AI track of the ICPC, with the same 5-hour time limit to solve all twelve problems, submitting to the ICPC World Finals Local Judge – judged identically and concurrently to the ICPC World Championship submissions,” OpenAI’s Mostafa Rohaninejad posted on X “We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time harness whatsoever. For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved,” he added.
“We competed with an ensemble of general-purpose reasoning models; we did not train any model specifically for the ICPC. We had both GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model generating solutions, and the experimental reasoning model selecting which solutions to submit. GPT-5 answered 11 correctly, and the last (and most difficult problem) was solved by the experimental reasoning model,” he added.
OpenAI seems to have done one better than Google at the competition — it got all 12 problems correct, while Google had got 10 out of 12 correct, and OpenAI placed ahead of all humans, while Google would’ve ranked second behind a human team. OpenAI and Google had both also delivered gold medal performances at the International Mathematics Olympiad earlier this year. But these latest results show how rapidly AI is getting better at coding. A few months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had predicted that an AI system would be the best coder in the world by the end of the year, and with both Google and OpenAI delivering gold medal performances at one of the top coding competitions in the world, it does seem that Altman’s prediction has already come true.