How OpenAI Beat Every Human Team at the World's Hardest Coding Competition
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We didn't tell it to do that. It had never done that before. Can our models actually discover some new knowledge? One of the problems that no human contestants solved, our models solved. GPT-5 tried seven times to solve that last problem. It was just like something else. It was mind blowing. They'd write solutions that were so bad that the little virtual computer the sandbox would give it would just crash.
The world's most elite programmers trained for years to compete at ICPC, the Olympics of coding. This year, OpenAI's system solved all 12 problems, outscoring every human team in the world finals. Today, we're joined by one of the researchers that made that happen. Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by Grant Harvey.
writer of the Neuron Daily Newsletter. This episode is brought to you by Whisperflow. More on them to come later on. But today we are chatting with Ahmed El-Kishki. Ahmed is a research lead at OpenAI, where he focuses on advancing reasoning, tool use, and programming capabilities in AI models. He holds a PhD in computer science and has worked at Twitter and Meta on large-scale data mining, multilingual NLP, and cross-lingual representation.
Most recently, and what's brought us together today, though, Ahmed was a part of the team behind OpenAI's historic win at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where their system solved every problem in the world finals, marking the first time an AI has defeated all human teams. Ahmed, welcome to The Neuron. Thank you for having me, Corey. First off, congratulations. How did it feel when the moment that the system cleared that 12th problem and you realized, you know, wow, we've just made history? Is that what you expected?
Actually, we weren't expecting to get all of them right. So let me give you a quick like summary of like how these competitions go. We generally don't really like... prep for them too much. Usually it's say, Hey, like if we have enough time, a group of like two to three people can like form a rag tag team and just try to get something like this going. So in this case, we had like three or so people from my team. They flew out to Azerbaijan, which is, you know, way on the other side of the world. We had somebody like, you know, back home here making sure everything was up and ready systems wise. And yeah, like they were almost like hackathoning it. They were just like up, you know, sitting there with everybody in the competition.
They had the same five hour limits. They were just like eagerly looking at the problems. Like as, you know, the model came back with a solution, they'd like, you know, eagerly submit it. And the cool part is like, the first 11 that were submitted, everyone was correct on the first try. So it was mind blown. We didn't even think that would happen. And then we got to the last problem, and the last problem was so difficult. We kept submitting it every 10 or so minutes, and it would be wrong. So it was a little bit nerve wracking. It already like four hours, it passed, it already gone to like the last hour of the competition. And we're like, okay, we're probably like, you know, 11 out of 12 is pretty good.
You know, that's, you know, already really great. We were looking at the scoreboards. Um, and then like in the last, like little bit of the competition, we saw that answer accepted and it was just like something else. It was just, it was mind blowing just seeing all 12, um, It was, like, really a pivotal moment for, like, just AI, but also, like, all the hard work we've been doing so far.
That seems so exciting and fun, like, just like playing high school basketball or something.
I know. I was going to say, I could see the sports movie, like, of this playing in my head, you know? Definitely going to do a biopic.
Actually, it's kind of interesting. We've been doing, like, you know, this year we've done several of these program competitions, and it is almost like sports. I've never actually, like... you know, closely followed competitive programming.
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