CapabilitiesPartially correct
“Our very first reasoning model was like a top one-millionth competitive programmer in the world... o3, which we talked about publicly in December, is the 175th best competitive programmer in the world. I think our internal benchmark is now around 50, and maybe we'll hit number one by the end of this year.”
CEO of OpenAI
Said Feb 8, 2025Deadline Dec 31, 2025Video clip of Sam Altman's remarks posted to X by @tsarnick, February 8, 2025
OpenAI's reasoning models did reach the very top tier during 2025 — a perfect 12/12 at the September 2025 ICPC World Finals, enough for a first-place human team ranking — but no OpenAI model was verifiably the world's number-one individual competitive programmer by December 31, 2025: human champion Przemysław 'Psyho' Dębiak beat OpenAI's model at the AtCoder World Tour Finals heuristic contest in July 2025, and OpenAI only swept the top humans at AtCoder in mid-2026.