How OpenAI Beat Every Human Team at the World's Hardest Coding Competition

The Neuron: AI Explained

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.

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