The Neuron: AI Explained
How OpenAI Beat Every Human Team at the World's Hardest Coding Competition
01 Oct 2025
In this episode, we're joined by Ahmed El-Kishky, research lead at OpenAI, to discuss their historic victory at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) where their AI system solved all 12 problems, beating every human team in the world finals. We dive into how they combined GPT-5 with experimental reasoning models, the dramatic last-minute solve, and what this means for the future of programming and AI-assisted science. Ahmed shares behind-the-scenes stories from Azerbaijan, explains how AI learns to test its own code, and discusses OpenAI's path from this win to automating scientific discovery over months and years.Subscribe to The Neuron: https://theneuron.aiWisprFlow: https://wisprflow.ai/neuronOpenAI: https://openai.com
Full Episode
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.
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