DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

> I think that, if you gave me the ability to search the pre-contest Internet and a week to prepare my submissions, I would be kind of embarrassed if I didn't get gold, and I'd find the contest to be rather less interesting than I would find the real thing.

I don't know what your personal experience with competitive programming is, so your statement may be true for yourself, but I can confidently state that this is not true for the VAST majority of programmers and software engineers.

Much like trying to do IMO problems without tons of training/practice, the mid-to-hard problems in the ICPC are completely unapproachable to the average computer science student (who already has a better chance than the average software engineer) in the course of a week.

In the same way that LLMs have memorized tons of stuff, the top competitors capable of achieving a gold medal at the ICPC know algorithms, data structures, and how to pattern match them to problems to an extreme degree.

It doesn't matter how many instances were running. All that matters is the wall clock time and the cost.

The fact that they don't disclose the cost is a clue that it's probably outrageous today. But costs are coming down fast. And hiring a team of these guys isn't exactly cheap either.

Ha so true. I was so tempted to copy and paste a problem into GPT5 and see what it would say

I've competed in these contest before. There are probably more difficult than what we can call _elite_ competitive programmer

note: my team only passed the first 2 rounds, far from bragging about my skills here :)

Sounds like a bug. Did you try it again (or with another leading-edge model) and get a similar result?

I don't see that much reason to be skeptical since this basically lines up with the trend we've been seeing in their performance.

So outside of human intervention, I don't think the specifics really matter. What this means is that it is possible and that this capability will in time be commoditized.

This is helpful in framing the conversation, especially with "skeptics" of what these models are capable of.

In 2015 SotA models blew past all expectations for engine performance in Go, but that didn't translate into LLM-based Code agents for another ~7 years (and even now the performance of these is up for debate). I think what this shows is that humans are extremely bad at understanding what problems are "hard" for computers; or rather we don't understand how to group tasks by difficulty in a generalizable way (success in a previously "hard" domain doesn't necessarily translate to performance in other domains of seemingly comparable difficult). It's incredibly impressive how these models perform in these contests, and certainly demonstrates that these tools have high potential in *specific areas* , but I think we might also need to accept that these are not necessarily good benchmarks for these tools' efficacy in less structured problem spaces.

Copying from a comment I made a few weeks ago:

> I dunno I can see an argument that something like IMO word problems are categorically a different language space than a corpus of historiography. For one, even when expressed in English language math is still highly, highly structured. Definitions of terms are totally unambiguous, logical tautologies can be expressed using only a few tokens, etc. etc. It's incredibly impressive that these rich structures can be learned by such a flexible model class, but it definitely seems closer (to me) to excelling at chess or other structured game, versus something as ambiguous as synthesis of historical narratives.

edit: oh small world! the cited comment was actually a response to you in that other thread :D

People pattern match with a very low-resolution view of the world (web3/crypt/nfts were a bubble because there was hype, so there must be a bubble since AI is hyped! I am very smart) and fail to reckon with the very real ways in which AI is fundamentally different.

Also I think people do understand just how big of a deal AI is but don't want to accept it or at least publicly admit it because they are scared for a number of reasons, least of all being human irrelevance.

Even Sam Altman himself thinks we’re in a bubble, and he ought to have a good sense of the wind direction here.

I think the contradiction here can be reconciled by how these tests don’t tend to run on the typical hardware constraints they need to be able do this at scale. And herein lies a large part of the problem as far as I can tell; in late 2024, OpenAI realized they had to rethink GPT-5 since their first attempt became too costly to run. This delayed the model and when it finally released, it was not a revolutionary update but evolutionary at best compared to o3. Benchmarks published by OpenAI themselves indicated a 10% gain over o3 for God knows how much cash and well over a year of work. We certainly didn’t have those problems in 2023 or even 2024.

DeepSeek has had to delay R2, and Mistral has had to delay Mistral 3 Large, teased within weeks back in May. No word from either about what’s going on. DS is said to move more to Huawei and this is behind a delay but I don’t think it’s entirely clear it has nothing to do with performance issues.

It would be more strange to _not_ have people speculate about stagnation or bubbles given these events and public statements.

Personally, I’m not sure if stagnation is the right word. We’re seeing a lot,of innovation in toolsets and platforms surrounding LLM’s like Codex, Claude Code, etc. I think we’ll see more in this regard and that this will provide more value than the core improvements to the LLM’s themselves in 2026.

And as for the bubble, I think we are in one but mostly because the market has been so incredibly hot. I see a bubble not because AI will fall apart but because there are too many products and services right now in a golden rush era. Companies will fail but not because AI suddenly starts failing us but due to saturation.

There is a clear difference between what OpenAI manages to do with GPT-5 and what I manage to do with GPT-5. The other day I asked for code to generate a linear regression and it gave back a figure of some points and a line through it.

If GPT-5, as claimed, is able to solve all problems in ICPC, please give the instructions on how I can reproduce it.

    Solve the following problem from a competitive programming contest. Output only the exact code needed to get it to pass on the submission server.

   I need to tackle a problem where no web-based help is available. The task involves checking if a given tree can be the result of inserting numbers 1 to n into an empty skew heap, following the described insertion algorithm. I have to figure out the minimal and maximal permutations that produce such a tree.

My response simply is that performance in coding competitions such as ICPC is a very different skillset than what is required in a regular software engineering job. GPT-5 still cannot make sense of my company's legacy codebase even if asked to do the most basic tasks that a new grad out of college can figure out in a day or two. I recently asked it to fix a broken test (I had messed with it by changing one single assertion) and it declared "success" by deleting the entire test suite.

Don't worry, they're just stochastic parrots copying answers from Stack Overflow. ;)

It's important to look closely at the details of how these models actually do these things.

If you look at the details of how Google got gold at IMO, you'll see that AlphaGeometry only relies on LLMs for a very specific part of the whole system, and the LLM wasn't the core problem solving system in play.

Most of AlphaGeometry is standard algorithms at play solving geometry problems using known constraints. When the algorithmic system gets stuck, it reaches out to LLMs that were fine tuned specifically for creating new geometric constraints. So the LLM would create new geometric constraints and pass that back to the algorithmic parts to get it unstuck, and repeat.

Without more details, it's not clear if this win is also the Gpt-5 and Gemini models we use, or specially fine-tuned models that are integrated with other non-LLM and non-ML based systems to solve these.

Not being solved purely by LLM isn't a knock on it, but with the current conversations going on today with LLMs, these are heavily being marketed as "LLMs did this all by themselves", which doesn't match with a lot of the evidence I've personally seen.

Well, the supposed PhD-level models are still pretty dumb when they get to consumers, so what gives?

The last time I asked for a code review from AI was last week. It added (hallucinated) some extra lines to the code and then marked them as buggy. Yes, it beats humans at coding — great!

This comment makes me think. What did previous winners of these competition go on to do in their lives? Anything spectacular?

> So this year SotA models have gotten gold at IMO, IoI, ICPC > Yet the most reposted headlines and rethoric is "wall this", "stangation that", "model regression", "winter", "bubble", doom etc.

this is narrow niche with high amount of training data (they all buy training data from leetcode), and this results are not necessary generalizable on overall industrial tasks

I for one welcome advancement of science and mathematics from our AI overlords

Why the AI hate? How is it different from sharing your knowledge with another individual or writing a book to share it?

> AI companies are not paying anyone for that piece of information

So? For the vast majority of human existence, paying for content was not a thing, just like paying for air isn't. The copyright model you are used to may just be too forced. Many countries have no moral qualms about "pirating" Windows and other pieces of software or games (they won't afford to purchase anyway.) There's no inherent morality or entitlement for author receiving payment for everything they "create" (to wit, Bill Gates had to write a letter to Homebrew Computer Club to make a case for this, showing that it was hardly the default and natural viewpoint.) It's just a legal/social contract to achieve specific goals for the society. Frankly the wheels of copyright have been falling off since the dawn of the Internet, not LLM.

Not sure by what metric you compare the difficulty, but regardless of the hardness of the problem, IIRC, ICPC requires 100% correctness on test cases to score a problem (even failing one means you don't get the score,) but IOI would admit fractional scores (correct me if I am wrong.)

What makes you say that they are easier? Are there more people who manages to solve a problem from ICPC than from IOI?

How do you compare those?

There were at least 2 very simple problems in IOI this year.

I haven't read the ICPC problem set, and perhaps there are some low-hanging fruits, but I highly doubt it.

Ok but if they can pump those compute and get science/math advancements it's worth something even if the costs are very high

Models drop in price x10 each year. Us, common folk, getting access to these kinds of models is just a matter of time.