The world-beating results for AI are coming in thick and fast.
OpenAI has delivered a gold-medal winning performance at the International Informatics Olympiad 2025, a premier competitive programming event. Their AI system placed number 6 when ranked with other humans, and number 1 among other AIs. OpenAI says it did not train a model specially for the event. The IOI is the world’s top programming competition for pre-college students, and involves two intense days of solving complex algorithmic problems under strict runtime and memory limits.
“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,” OpenAI said on X. OpenAI said that the same model had delivered a gold-medal performance at the International Maths Olympiad, and placed second at the AtCoder competitive programming event behind a human coder.
“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,” said OpenAI’s Sheryl Hsu on X.
The result is a big step up for OpenAI, which had a 49 percentile score last year, just shy of a bronze medal. This year, OpenAI’s AI model managed 98 percentile, with a gold-medal performance.
OpenAI isn’t the only AI lab that has officially delivered a gold-medal performance at an Olympiad in recent times. Google had earlier officially delivered a similar performance at the International Mathematics Olympiad, while OpenAI too had said that it had delivered a similar performance as per an internal evaluation.
And all this progress has been predicted by top AI leaders. Former Google CEO Erid Schmidt has said that the vast majority of programmers will be replaced with AI by the middle of 2026. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that AI will be able to operate at the level of a mid-level engineer by the end of 2025. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had said in February this year that the world’s best programmer will be an AI by the end of 2025. And with an OpenAI model winning gold at a top programming competition — and placing 6th among human coders — these predictions might well be on track if AI continues to keep improving at the pace at which has been over the last couple of years.